




















FATHER GORIOT 
M. GOBSECK 

















THERE WAS A SPLENDID CARRIAGE WAITING AND SHE 

COT INTO IT 




\ 




t 



H; DE BALZAC 

M 


FATHER GORIOT 
URSULE MIROUET 

AND OTHER STORIES 


TRANSLATED BY 

ELLEN MARRIAGE and CLARA BELL 

i \ 


WITH PREFACES BY 

GEORGE SAINTSBURY 


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> > > 

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PHILADELPHIA 

The Gebbie Publishing Co., Ltd 

1899 




x *v 






CONTENTS 


VOLUME I. 

PACK 

PREFACE . ix 

FATHER GORIOT I 

M GOBSECK . 305 


VOLUME II. 

PREFACE ix 

URSULE MIROUET 

I. THE HEIRS IN ALARM I 

II. THE MINORET PROPERTY 136 

MADAME FIR MIA A 7 I 257 

A FORSAKEN WOMAN 280 

THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS 329 



1 \j Tnssftr 

4»#o/ 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 


VOLUME I. 


THERE WAS A SPLENDID CARRIAGE WAITING AND she GOT 

INTO IT (p. 27) . . . . . . Frontispiece 

PAGE 

THE HORSE TOOK FRIGHT AT THE UMBRELLA • • • • 59 

“AM I TO YOUR TASTE?” 1 5 1 

VAUTRIN CAME IN IN HIGH SPIRITS 1 83 


CLOTHES AND PAPERS AND RAGS LAY TOSSED ABOUT IN 

V . * ‘ , 

CONFUSION ■ ' . . . . 363 

Drawn by IV. Boucher. 

VOLUME II. 


HE TOOK MINORET S HAND 


AND WITH HIS OTHER HAND 


HE TOOK THAT OF THE WOMAN IN THE CHAIR 

“WHAT AILS YOU, CRUEL CHILD?” HE SAID 

HE GAZED IN ADMIRATION AT URSULE 

“YOU STOLE THE THREE CERTIFICATES” 

Drawn by D. Murray-Smith. 


71 

IOI 

I44 

237 




r 


















































PREFACE. 


“ Father Goriot ” perhaps deserves to be ranked as that 
one of Balzac’s novels which has united the greatest number 
of suffrages, and which exhibits his peculiar merits, not indeed 
without any of his faults, but with the merits in eminent, and 
the faults not in glaring, degree. It was written (the preface 
is dated 1834) at the time when his genius was at its very 
height, when it had completely burst the strange shell which 
had so long enveloped and cramped it, when the scheme of the 
“ Comedie Humaine ” was not quite finally settled (it never 
was that), but elaborated to a very considerable extent, when 
the author had already acquired most of the knowledge of the 
actual world which he possessed, and when his physical powers 
were as yet unimpaired by his enormous labor and his reckless 
disregard of “ burning the candle at both ends.” Although 
it exhibits, like nearly all his work, the complication of interest 
and scheme which was almost a necessity to him, that compli- 
cation is kept within reasonable bounds, and managed with 
wonderful address. The history of Goriot and his daughters, 
the fortunes of Eugene de Rastignac, and the mysterious per- 
sonality and operations of Vautrin, not only all receive due 
and unperplexed development, but work upon each other with 
that correspondence and interdependence which form the 
rarest gift of the novelist, and which, when present, too com- 
monly have attached to them the curse of over-minuteness and 
complexity. No piece of Balzac’s Dutch painting is worked 
out with such marvelous minuteness as the Maison Vauquer, 
and hardly any book of his has more lifelike studies of 
character. 

(ix) 


X 


PREFACE . 


It would, however, not be difficult to find books with an 
almost, if not quite, equal accumulation of attractions, which 
have somehow failed to make the mark that has been made 
by “ Father Goriot.” And the practiced critic of novels 
knows perfectly well why this is. It is almost invariably, and 
perhaps quite invariably, because there is no sufficiently central 
interest, or because that interest is not of the broadly human 
kind. Had Goriot had no daughters, he would undoubtedly 
have been a happier man (or a less happy, for it is possible to 
take it both ways) ; but the history of his decadence and death 
never could have been such a good novel. It is because this 
history of the daughters — not exactly unnatural, not wholly 
without excuse, but as surely murderesses of their father as 
Goneril and Regan — at once unites and overshadows the 
whole, because of its intensity, its simple and suasive appeal, 
that “ Father Goriot ” holds the place it does hold. That it 
owes something in point of suggestion to “ Lear ” does not in 
the least impair its claims. The circumstances and treatment 
have that entire difference which, when genius is indebted to 
genius, pays all the score there is at once. And, besides, 
“Lear” has offered its motive for three hundred years to 
thousands and millions of people who have been writing plays 
and novels, and yet there is only one “ Father Goriot.” 

It is, however, a fair subject of debate for those who like 
critical argument of the nicer kind, whether Balzac has or has 
not made a mistake in representing the ex-dealer in floury com- 
pounds as a sort of idiot outside his trade abilities and his love 
■for his daughters. That in doing so he was guided by a sense 
of poetical justice and consistency — the same sense which 
made Shakespeare dwell on the ungovernable temper and the 
undignified haste to get rid of the cares of sovereignty that 
bring on and justify the woes of Lear — is undeniable. But 
it would perhaps not have been unnatural, and it would have 
been even more tragic, if the ci-devani manufacturer had been 
represented as more intellectually capable, and as ruining him- 


PREFACE. 


xi 


self in spite of his better judgment. On this point, however, 
both sides may be held with equal ease and cogency, and I do 
not decide either way. Of the force and pathos of the actual 
representation, no two opinions are possible. There is hardly 
a touch of the one fault which can be urged against Balzac very 
often with some, and sometimes with very great, justice — the 
fault of exaggeration and phantasmagoric excess. Here at 
least the possibilities of actual life, as translatable into litera- 
ture, are not one whit exceeded ; and the artist has his full 
reward for being true to art. 

Almost equally free from the abnormal and the gigantic is 
the portraiture of Rastignac. Even those who demur to the 
description of Balzac as an impeccable chronicler of society 
must admit the extraordinary felicity of the pictures of the 
young man’s introduction to the drawing-rooms of Mesdames 
de Restaud and de Beauseant. Neither Fielding nor Thack- 
eray — that is to say, no one else in the world of letters — could 
have drawn with more absolute vividness and more absolute 
veracity a young man, not a parvenu in point of birth, not 
devoid of native cleverness and “star,” but hampered by the 
consciousness of poverty and by utter ignorance of the actual 
ways and current social fashions of the great world when he is 
first thrown, to sink or swim, into this great world itself. We 
may pass from the certain to the dubious, or at least the 
debatable, when we pass from Rastignac’s first appearance to 
his later experiences. Here comes in what has been said in 
the general introduction as to the somewhat fantastic and 
imaginary, the conventional and artificial character of Balzac's 
world. But it must be remembered that for centuries the 
whole structure of Parisian society has been to a very great 
extent fantastic and imaginary, conventional and artificial. 
Men and women have always played parts there as they have 
played them nowhere else. And it must be confessed that 
some of the parts here, if planned to the stage, are played to 
the life — that of Madame de Beauseant especially. 


xii 


PREFACE. 


It is Vautrin on whom Balzac’s decriers, if they are so 
hardy as to attack this most unattackable be ok of his at all, 
must chiefly fasten. It was long ago noticed — indeed, sober 
eyes both in France and elsewhere noticed it at the time — 
that the criminal, more or less virtuous, more or less terrible, 
more or less superhuman, exercised a kind of sorcery over 
minds in France from the greatest to the least at this particular 
time, and even later. Not merely Balzac, but Victor Hugo 
and George Sand, succumbed to his fascinations ; and after 
these three names it is quite unnecessary to mention any 
others. And Balzac’s proneness to the enormous and gigant- 
esque made the fascination peculiarly dangerous in his case. 
Undoubtedly the Vautrin who talks to Rastignac in the arbor 
is neither quite a real man nor quite the same man who is 
somewhat ignominiously caught by the treachery of his board- 
ing-house fellows ; undoubtedly we feel that with him we 
have left Shakespeare a long way behind, and are getting 
rather into the society of Bouchardy or Eugene Sue. But 
the genius is here likewise, and, as usual, it saves everything. 

How it extends to the minutest and even the least savory 
details of Madame Vauquer’s establishment, how it irradiates 
the meannesses and the sordidnesses of the inhabitants thereof, 
those who have read know, and those who are about to read 
this new presentation in English will find. Let it only be 
repeated, that if the rarest and strangest charms which Balzac 
can produce are elsewhere, nowhere else is his charm pre 
sented in a more pervading and satisfactory manner. 

In 11 M. Gobseck ” we find the hero quite interesting, the 
story of Derville and Fanny escapes mawkishness, and all the 
scenes in which the Restauds and Maxime de Trailles figure 
are admirably done and well worth reading. It is not neces- 
sary to take into consideration the important part which the 
Dutch Jew’s grand-daughter or grandniece, Esther, afterwards 
plays in the “Com&Iie.” He is good in himself, and a 


PREFACE . 


xiii 


famous addition to Balzac’s gallery of misers, the most inter- 
esting, if not the most authentic, ever arranged on that curious 
subject. 

“ M. Gobseck ” was a “ Scene de la vie Privee ” from the 
first use of that title in 1830. Its own title, however, “ Les 
Dangers de l’lnconduit,” and “Papa Gobseck” varied a 
little, and it once made an excursion to the “Scenes de la vie 
Parisienne,” but returned. 

“Father Goriot ” originallyappeared as a book in 1835, 
published by Werdet and Spahmann, in two volumes. It had, 
however, appeared serially in the Revue de Paris during the 
previous winter. The first and some subsequent editions had 
seven chapter-divisions, six of them headed. These, accord- 
ing to Balzac’s usual practice, were swept away when the book 
became, in 1843, P ai *t °f the “Scenes de la vie Parisienne” 
and the “ Comedie ” itself. The transferrence to the “Vie 
Privee,” which is accomplished in the “ Edition Definitive,” 
was only executed in accordance with notes found afte? 
Balzac’s death, and is far from happy, the book being essen 
iially Parisian. 

G. S. 

































•* 

5 



' 





















To the great and illustrious Geojfroy 
Hilaire , a token of admiration for his 
and genius. 


FATHER GORIOT 


De Balzac. 



Mme. Vauquer ( nee de Conflans) is an elderly person, who 
for the past forty years has kept a lodging-house in the Rue 
Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve, in the district that lies between the 
Latin Quarter and the Faubourg-Saint-Marcel. Her house 
(known in the neighborhood as the Maison Vauquer ) receives 
men and women, old and young, and no word has ever been 
breathed against her respectable establishment ; but, at the 
same time, it must be said that as a matter of fact no young 
woman has been under her roof for thirty years, and that if a 
young man stays there for any length of time it is a sure sign 
that his allowance must be of the slenderest. In 1819, how- 
ever, the time when this drama opens, there was an almost 
penniless young girl among Mme. Vauquer’s boarders. 

That word drama has been somewhat discredited of late ; 
it has been overworked and twisted to strange uses in these 
days of dolorous literature ; but it must do service again here, 
not because this story is dramatic in the restricted sense of 
the word, but because some tears may perhaps be shed intra 
et extra muros before it is over. 

Will any one without the walls of Paris understand it ? It 
is open to doubt. The only audience who could appreciate 
the results of close observation, the careful reproduction of 
minute detail and local color, are dwellers between the heights 
of Montrouge and Montmartre, in a vale of crumbling stucco 
watered by streams of black mud, a vale of sorrows which 
are real and of joys too often hollow ; but this audience is so 


*( 1 ) 


2 


FATHER GORIOT. 


accustomed to terrible sensations, that onlv unimaginable 
and well-nigh impossi^° ^oe could produce any lasting 
impression there. Now and again there are tragedies so 
awful and so grand by reason of the complication of virtues 
and vices that bring them about, that egoism and selfishness 
are forced to pause and are moved to pity ; but the impression 
that they receive is like a luscious fruit, soon consumed. 
Civilization, like the car of Juggernaut, is scarcely stayed 
perceptibly in its progress by a heart less easy to break than 
the others that lie in its course ; this also is broken, and 
civilization continues on her course triumphant. And you, 
too, will do the like ; you who with this book in your white 
hand will sink back among the cushions of your armchair, 
and say to yourself, “Perhaps this may amuse me.” You 
will read the story of Father Goriot’s secret woes, and, dining 
thereafter with an unspoiled appetite, will lay the blame of 
your insensibility upon the writer, and accuse him of exagger- 
ation, of writing romances. Ah ! once for all, this drama is 
neither a fiction nor a romance ! All is true — so true, that 
every one can discern the elements of the tragedy in his own 
house, perhaps in his own heart. 

The lodging-house is Mme. Vauquer’s own property. It is 
still standing at the lower end of the Rue Neuve-Sainte- 
Genevieve, just where the road slopes so sharply down to the 
Rue de l’Arbalete, that wheeled traffic seldom passes that 
way, because it is so stony and steep. This position is suffi- 
cient to account for the silence prevalent in the streets shut 
in between the dome of the Pantheon and the dome of the 
Val-de Grace, two conspicuous public buildings which give a 
yellowish tone to the landscape and darken the whole district 
that lies beneath the shadow of their leaden-hued cupolas. 

In that district the pavements are clean and dry, there is 
neither mud nor water in the gutters, grass grows in the chinks 
of the walls. The most heedless passer-by feels the depressing 
influences of a place where the sound of wheels creates a sen- 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


sation ; there is a grim look about the houses, a suggestion of 
a jail about those high garden walls. A Parisian straying 
into a suburb apparently composed of lodging-houses and 
public institutions would see poverty and dulness, old age 
lying down to die, and joyous youth condemned to drudgery. 
It is the ugliest quarter of Paris, and, it may be added, the 
least known. But, before all things, the Rue Neuve-Sainte- 
Genevieve is like a bronze frame for a picture for which the 
mind cannot be too well prepared by the contemplation of sad 
hues and sober images. Even so, step by step the daylight 
decreases, and the cicerone’s droning voice grows hollower as 
the traveler descends into the catacombs. The comparison 
holds good ! Who shall say which is more ghastly, the sight 
of the bleached skulls or of dried-up human hearts? 

The front of the lodging-house is at right-angles to the 
road, and looks out upon a little garden, so that you see the 
side of the house in section, as it were, from the Rue Neuve- 
Sainte-Genevieve. Beneath the wall of the house-front there 
lies a channel, a fathom wide, paved with cobble-stones, and 
beside it runs a graveled walk bordered by geraniums and 
oleanders and pomegranates set in great blue and white glazed 
earthenware pots. Access into the graveled walk is afforded 
by a door, above which the words Maison Vauquer may be 
read, and beneath, in rather smaller letters, “Lodgings for both 
sexes , etc." 

During the day a glimpse into the garden is easily obtained 
through a wicket to which a bell is attached. On the oppo- 
site wall, at the farther end of the graveled walk, a green 
marble arch was painted once upon a time by a local artist, 
and in this semblance of a shrine a statue representing Cupid 
is installed ; a Parisian Cupid, so blistered and disfigured that 
he looks like a candidate for one of the adjacent hospitals, and 
might suggest an allegory to lovers of symbolism. The half- 
obliterated inscription on the pedestal beneath determines the 


4 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


date of this work of art, for it bears witness to the wide- 
spread enthusiasm felt for Voltaire on his return to Paris 
in 1777 — 

“ Whoe’er thou art, thy master see ; 

He is, or was, or ought to be.” 

At night the wicket gate is replaced by a solid door. The 
little garden is no wider than the front of the house ; it is shut 
in between the wall of the street and the partition wall of the 
neighboring house. A mantle of ivy conceals the bricks and 
attracts the eyes of passers-by to an effect which is picturesque 
in Paris, for each of the walls is covered with trellised vines 
that yield a scanty, dusty crop of fruit, and furnish besides 
a subject of conversation for Mme. Vauquer and her lodgers; 
every year the widow trembles for her vintage. 

A straight path beneath the walls on either side of the 
garden leads to a clump of lime trees at the farther end of 
it ; line trees, as Mme. Vauquer persists in calling them, in 
spite of the fact that she was a de Conflans, and regardless 
of repeated corrections from her lodgers. 

The central space between the walks is filled with artichokes 
and rows of pyramid fruit-trees, and surrounded by a border 
of lettuce, potherbs, and parsley. Under the lime trees there 
are a few green-painted garden seats and a wooden table, and 
hither, during the dog-days, such of the lodgers as are rich 
enough to indulge in a cup of coffee come to take their pleasure, 
though it is hot enough to roast eggs even in the shade. 

The house itself is three stories high, without counting the 
attics under the roof. It is built of rough stone, and covered 
with the yellowish stucco that gives a mean appearance to 
almost every house in Paris. There are five windows in each 
story in the front of the house ; all the blinds visible through 
the small square panes are drawn up awry, so that the lines 
are all at cross-purposes. At the side of the house there are 
but two windows on each floor, and the lowest of all are 
adorned with a heavy iron grating. 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


5 


Behind the house a yard extends for some twenty feet, a 
space inhabited by a happy family of pigs, poultry, and rab- 
bits ; the wood-shed is situated on the farther side, and on the 
wall between the wood-shed and the kitchen window hangs 
the meat-safe, just above the place where the sink discharges 
its greasy streams. The cook sweeps all the refuse out throught^^ 
a little door into the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve, and fre- 
quently cleanses the yard with copious supplies of water, 
under pain of pestilence. 

The house might have ‘been built on purpose for its present 
uses. Access is given by a French window to the first room 
on the ground floor, a sitting-room which looks out upon the 
street through the two barred windows already mentioned. 
Another door opens out of it into the dining-room, which is 
separated from the kitchen by the wall of the staircase, the 
steps being constructed partly of wood, partly of tiles, which 
are colored and beeswaxed. Nothing can be more depressing 
than the sight of that sitting-room. The furniture is covered 
with horsehair woven in alternate dull and glossy stripes. 
There is a round table in the middle, with a purplish-red 
marble top, on which there stands, by way of ornament, the 
inevitable white china tea-service, covered with a half-effaced 
gilt network. The floor is sufficiently uneven, the wainscot 
rises to elbow height, and the rest of the wall space is deco- 
rated with a varnished paper, on which the principal scenes 
from Telemaqiie are depicted, the various classical personages 
being colored. The subject between the two windows is the 
banquet given by Calypso to the son of Ulysses, displayed 
thereon for the admiration of the boarders, and has furnished 
jokes these forty years to the young men who show themselves 
superior to their position by making fun of the dinners to 
which poverty condemns them. The hearth is always so clean 
and neat that it is evident that a fire is only kindled there on 
great occasions ; the stone chimney-piece is adorned by a 
couple of vases filled with faded artificial flowers imprisoned 


6 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


under glass shades, on either side of a bluish-marble clock in 
the very worst taste. 

The first room exhales an odor for which there is no name 
in the language, and which should be called the boarding- 
house stench. The damp air sends a chill through you as you 
breathe it ; it has a stuffy, musty, and rancid quality ; it per- 
meates your clothing ; after-dinner scents seem to be mingled 
in it with smells from the kitchen and scullery and the reek 
of a hospital. It might be possible to describe it if some one 
should discover a process by which to distil from the atmo- 
sphere all the nauseating elements with which it is charged by 
the catarrhal exhalations of every individual lodger, young or 
old. Yet, in spite of these stale horrors, the sitting-room is as 
charming and as delicately perfumed as a boudoir, when com- 
pared with the adjoining dining-room. 

The paneled walls of that apartment were once painted 
some color, now a matter of conjecture, for the surface is 
incrusted with accumulated layers of grimy deposit, which 
cover it with fantastic outlines. A collection of dim-ribbed 
glass decanters, metal discs with a satin sheen on them, and 
piles of blue-edged earthenware plates of Touraine ware cover 
the sticky surfaces of the sideboards that line the room. In a 
corner stands a box containing a set of numbered pigeon-holes, 
in which the lodgers’ table napkins, more or less soiled and 
stained with wine, are kept. Here you see that indestructible 
furniture never met with elsewhere, which finds its way into 
lodging-houses much as the wrecks of our civilization drift 
into hospitals for incurables. You expect in such places as 
these to find the weather-house whence a Capuchin issues on 
wet days ; you look to find the execrable engravings which 
spoil your appetite, framed every one in a black varnished 
frame, with a gilt beading round it ; you know the sort of 
tortoise-shell clock-case, inlaid with brass; the green stove, the 
Argand lamps, covered with oil and dust, have met your eyes 
before. The oilcloth which covers the long table is so greasy 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


7 


that a waggish outsider will write his name on the surface, 
using his thumb-nail as a style. The chairs are broken-down 
invalids ; the wretched little hempen mats slip away from 
under your feet without slipping away for good ; and, finally, 
the foot-warmers are miserable wrecks, hingeless, charred, 
broken away about the holes. It would be impossible to give 
an idea of the old, rotten, shaky, cranky, worm-eaten, halt, 
maimed, one-eyed, rickety, and ramshackle condition of the 
furniture without an exhaustive description, which would 
delay the progress of the story to an extent that impatient 
people would not pardon. The red tiles of the floor are full 
of depressions brought about by scouring and periodical 
renewings of color. In short, there is no illusory grace left 
to the poverty that reigns here ; it is dire, parsimonious, con- 
centrated, threadbare poverty ; as yet it has not sunk into the 
mire, it is only splashed by it, and, though not in rags as yet, 
its clothing is ready to drop to pieces. 

This apartment is in all its glory at seven o’clock in the 
morning, when Mme. Vauquer’s cat appears, announcing the 
near approach of his mistress, and jumps upon the sideboards 
to sniff at the milk in the bowls, each protected by a plate, 
while he purrs his morning greeting to the world. A moment 
later the widow shows her face ; she is tricked out in a net 
cap attached to a false front set on awry, and shuffles into the 
room in her slipshod fashion. She is an oldish woman, with 
a bloated countenance, and a nose like a parrot’s beak set in 
the middle of it ; her fat little hands (she is as sleek as a 
church rat) and her shapeless, slouching figure are in keeping 
with the room that reeks of misfortune, where hope is reduced 
to speculate for the meanest stakes. Mme. Vauquer alone can 
breathe that tainted air without being disheartened by it. 
Her face is as fresh as a frosty morning in autumn ; there are 
wrinkles about the eyes that vary in their expression from the 
set smile of a ballet-dancer to the dark, suspicious scowl of a 
discounter of bills ; in short, she is at once the embodiment 


8 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


and interpretation of her lodging-house, as surely as her 
lodging-house implies the existence of its mistress. You can 
no more imagine the one without the other, than you can 
think of a jail without a turnkey. The unwholesome corpus 
lence of the little woman is produced by the life she leads, 
just as typhus fever is bred in the tainted air of a hospital. 
The very knitted woolen petticoat that she wears beneath a 
skirt made of an old gown, with the wadding protruding 
through the rents in the material, is a sort of epitome of the 
sitting-room, the dining-room, and the little garden ; it dis- 
covers the cook ; it foreshadows the lodgers — the picture of 
the house is completed by the portrait of its mistress. 

Mme. Vauquer at the age of fifty is like all women who 
“have seen a deal of trouble.” She has the glassy eyes and 
innocent air of a trafficker in flesh and blood, who will wax 
virtuously indignant to obtain a higher price for her services, 
but who is quite ready to betray a Georges or a Pichegru, if a 
Georges or a Pichegru were in hiding and still to be be- 
trayed, or for any other expedient that may alleviate her lot. 
Still, “she is a good woman at bottom,” said the lodgers, 
who believed that the widow was wholly dependent upon the 
money that they paid her, and sympathized when they heard 
her cough and groan like one of themselves. 

What had M. Vauquer been ? The lady was never very ex- 
plicit on this head. How had she lost her money ? “ Through 

trouble,” was her answer. He had treated her badly, had 
left her nothing but her eyes to cry over his cruelty, the house 
she lived in, and the privilege of pitying nobody, because, so 
she was wont to say, she herself had been through every possi- 
ble misfortune. 

Sylvie, the stout cook, hearing her mistress’ shuffling foot- 
steps, hastened to serve the lodgers’ breakfast. Besides those 
who lived in the house, Mme. Vauquer took boarders who 
came for their meals ; but these outsiders usually only came to 
dinner, for which they paid thirty francs a month. 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


9 


At the time when this story begins, the lodging-house con- 
tained seven inmates. The best rooms in the house were on 
the first story, Mme. Vauquer herself occupying the least 
important, while the rest were let to a Mme. Couture, the 
widow of a commissary-general in the service of the Republic. 
With her lived Victorine Taillefer, a school-girl, to whom she 
filled the place of mother. These two ladies paid eighteen 
hundred francs a year. 

The two sets of rooms on the third floor were respectively 
occupied by an old man named Poiret and a man of forty or 
thereabouts, the wearer of a black wig and dyed whiskers, 
who gave out that he was a retired merchant, and was addressed 
♦ as M. Vautrin. Two of the four rooms on the fourth floor 
were also let — one to an elderly spinster, a Mile. Michonneau, 
and the other to a retired manufacturer of vermicelli, Italian 
paste and starch, who allowed the others to address him as 
“Father Goriot.” The remaining rooms were allotted to 
various birds of passage, to impecunious students, who, like 
“Father Goriot ” and Mile. Michonneau, could only muster 
forty-five francs a month to pay for their board and lodging. 
Mme. Vauquer had little desire for lodgers of this sort ; they 
ate too much bread, and she only took them in default of 
better. 

At that time one of the rooms was tenanted by a law stu- 
dent, a young man from the neighborhood of Angouldme, one 
of a large family who pinched and starved themselves to spare 
twelve hundred francs a year for him. Misfortune had accus- 
tomed Eugene de Rastignac, for that was his name, to work. 
He belonged to the number of young men who know as 
children that their parents’ hopes are centred on them, and 
deliberately prepare themselves for a great career, subordin- 
ating their studies from the first to this end, carefully watch- 
ing the indications of the course of events, calculating the 
probable turn that affairs will take, that they may be the first 
to profit by them. But for his observant curiosity, and the 


10 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


skill with which he managed to introduce himself into the 
salons of Paris, this story would not have been colored by 
the tones of truth which it certainly owes to him, for they 
are entirely due to his penetrating sagacity and desire to fathom 
the mysteries of an appalling condition of things which was 
concealed as carefully by the victim as by those who had 
brought it to pass. 

Above the third story there was a garret where the linen was 
hung to dry, and a couple of attics. Christophe, the man-of- 
all-work, slept in one, and Sylvie, the stout cook, in the other. 
Besides the seven inmates thus enumerated, taking one year 
with another, some eight law or medical students dined in the 
house, as well as two or three regular comers who lived in the 
neighborhood. There were usually eighteen people at dinner, 
and there was room, if need be, for twenty at Mme. Vauquer’s 
table ; at breakfast, however, only the seven lodgers appeared. 
It was almost like a family party. Every one came down in 
dressing-gown and slippers, and the conversation usually 
turned on anything that had happened the evening before ; 
comments on the dress or appearance of the dinner contin- 
gent were exchanged in friendly confidence. 

These seven lodgers were Mme. Vauquer’s spoiled children. 
Among them she distributed, with astronomical precision, the 
exact proportion of respect and attention due to the varying 
amounts they paid for their board. One single consideration 
influenced all these human beings thrown together by chance.. 
The two third-floor lodgers only paid seventy-two francs a 
month. Such prices as these are confined to the Faubourg 
Saint-Marcel and the district between La Bourbe and the 
Salpetriere ; and, as might be expected, poverty, more or less 
apparent, weighed upon them all, Mme. Couture being the 
sole exception to the rule. 

The dreary surroundings were reflected in the costumes of 
the inmates of the house ; all were alike threadbare. The 
color of the men’s coats was problematical; such shoes, in 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


11 


more fashionable quarters, are only to be seen lying in the 
gutter; the cuffs and collars were worn and frayed at the 
edges; every limp article of clothing looked like the ghost of 
its former self. The women’s dresses were faded, old-fash- 
ioned, dyed and re-dyed ; they wore gloves that were glazed 
with hard wear, much-mended lace, dingy ruffles, crumpled 
muslin fichus. So much for their clothing ; but, for the most 
part, their frames were solid enough ; their constitutions had 
weathered the storms of life ; their cold, hard faces were worn 
like coins that have been withdrawn from circulation, but 
there were greedy teeth behind the withered lips. Dramas 
brought to a close or still in progress are foreshadowed by the 
sight of such actors as these, not the dramas that are played 
before the footlights and against a background of painted 
canvas, but dumb dramas of life frost-bound dramas that sear 
hearts like fire, dramas that do not end with the actors’ lives. 

Mile. Michonneau, that elderly young lady, screened her 
weak eyes from the daylight by a soiled, green silk shade with 
a rim of brass, an object fit to scare away the Angel of Pity 
himself. Her shawl, with its scanty, draggled fringe, might 
have covered a skeleton, so meagre and angular was the form 
beneath it. Yet she must have been pretty and shapely once. 
What corrosive had destroyed the feminine outlines? Was it 
trouble, or vice, or greed ? Plad she loved too well ? Had 
she been a second-hand clothes dealer, a frequenter of the 
back-stairs of great houses, or had she been merely a courtesan ? 
Was she expiating the flaunting triumphs of a youth over- 
crowded with pleasures by an old age in which she was 
shunned by every passer-by? Her vacant gaze sent a chill 
through you ; her shriveled face seemed like a menace. Her 
voice was like the shrill, thin note of the grasshopper sound- 
ing from the thicket when winter is at hand. She said that she 
had nursed an old gentleman, ill of catarrh of the bladder, 
and left to die by his children, who thought that he had 
nothing left. His bequest to her, a life annuity of a thousand 


12 


FATHER GORIOT. 


francs, was periodically disputed by his heirs, who mingled 
slander with their persecutions. In spite of the ravages of 
conflicting passions, her face retained some traces of its former 
fairness and fineness of tissue, some vestiges of the physical 
charms of her youth still survived. 

M. Poiret was a sort of automaton. He might be seen any 
day sailing like a gray shadow along the walks of the Jardin 
des Plantes, on his head a shabby cap, a cane with an old 
yellow ivory handle in the tips of his thin fingers; the out- 
spread skirts of his threadbare overcoat failed to conceal his 
meagre figure ; his breeches hung loosely on his shrunken 
limbs ; the thin, blue-stockinged legs trembled like those of a 
drunken man ; there was a notable breach of continuity 
between the dingy white waistcoat and crumpled shirt frills 
and the cravat twisted about a throat like a turkey gobler’s; 
altogether, his appearance set people wondering whether this 
outlandish ghost belonged to the audacious race of the sons 
of Japhet who flutter about on the Boulevard Italien. What 
kind of toil could have so shriveled him? What devouring 
passions had darkened that bulbous countenance, which would 
have seemed outrageous as a caricature ? What had he been ? 
Well, perhaps he had been part of the machinery of justice, a 
clerk in the office to which the executioner sends in his ac- 
counts — so much for providing black veils for parricides, so 
much for sawdust, so much for pulleys and cord for the knife. 
Or he might have been a receiver at the door of a public 
slaughter-house, or a sub-inspector of nuisances. Indeed, the 
man appeared to have been one of the beasts of burden in our 
great social mill; one of those Parisian “ rats” whom their 
Bertrands do not even know by sight ; a pivot in the obscure 
machinery that disposes of misery and things unclean ; one 
of those men, in short, at sight of whom we are prompted to 
remark that, “ After all, we cannot do without them.” 

Stately Paris ignores the existence of these faces bleached 
by moral or physical suffering ; but, then, Paris is in truth an 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


13 


ocean that no line can fathom. You may survey its surface 
and describe it ; but no matter what pains you take with your 
investigations and recognizances, no matter how numerous 
and painstaking the toilers in this sea, there will always be 
lonely and unexplored regions in its depths, caverns unknown, 
flowers and pearls and monsters of the deep overlooked or 
forgotten by the divers of literature. The Maison Vauquer is 
one of these curious monstrosities. 

Two, however, of Mme. Vauquer’s boarders formed a strik- 
ing contrast to the rest. There was a sickly pallor, such as is 
often seen in anaemic girls, in Mile. Victorine Taillefer’s face ; 
and her unvarying expression of sadness, like her embarrassed 
manner and pinched look, was in keeping with the general 
wretchedness of the establishment in the Rue Neuve-Sainte- 
Genevieve, which forms a background to this picture ; but her 
face was young, there was youthfulness in her voice and elas- 
ticity in her movements. This young unfortunate was not 
unlike a shrub, newly planted in an uncongenial soil, where 
its leaves have already begun to wither. The outlines of her 
figure, revealed by her dress of the simplest and cheapest mate- 
rials, were also youthful. There was the same kind of charm 
about her too slender form, her faintly colored face and light- 
brown hair, that modern poets find in mediaeval statuettes ; 
and a sweet expression, a look of Christian resignation in the 
dark-gray eyes. She was pretty by force of contrast ; if she 
had been happy, she would have been charming. Happiness 
is the poetry of woman, as the toilet is her tinsel. If the 
delightful excitement of a ball had made the pale face glow 
with color; if the delights of a luxurious life had brought 
the color to the wan cheeks that were slightly hollowed 
already ; if love had put light into the sad eyes, then Victo- 
rine might have ranked among the fairest ; but she lacked the 
two things which create woman a second time — pretty dresses 
and love-letters. 

A book might have been made of her story. Her father 


14 • 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


was persuaded that he had sufficient reason for declin* 
ing to acknowledge her, and allowed her a bare six hundred 
francs a year ; he had further taken measures to disinherit his 
daughter, and had converted all his real estate into personalty, 
that he might leave it undivided to his son. Victorine’s 
mother had died broken-hearted in Mme. Couture’s house ; 
and the latter, who was a near relation, had taken charge of 
the little orphan. Unluckily, the widow of the commissary- 
general to the armies of the Republic had nothing in the 
world but her jointure and her widow’s pension, and some 
day she might be obliged to leave the helpless, inexperienced 
girl to the mercy of the world. The good soul, therefore, 
took Victorine to mass every Sunday, and to confession once 
a fortnight, thinking that, in any case, she would bring up her 
ward to be devout. She was right ; religion offered a solution 
of the problem of the young girl’s future. The poor child 
loved the father who refused to acknowledge her. Once every 
year she tried to see him to deliver her mother’s message of 
forgiveness, but every year hitherto she had knocked at that 
door in vain ; her father was inexorable. Her brother, her 
only means of communication, had not come to see her for 
four years, and had sent her no assistance ; yet she prayed to 
God to unseal her father’s eyes and to soften her brother’s 
heart, and no accusations mingled with her prayers. Mme. 
Couture and Mme. Vauquer exhausted the vocabulary of 
abuse, and failed to find words that did justice to the banker’s 
iniquitous conduct ; but while they heaped execrations on the 
millionaire, Victorine’s words were as gentle as the moan of 
the wounded dove, and affection found expression even in 
the cry drawn from her by pain. 

Eugene de Rastignac was a thoroughly southern type ; he 
had a fair complexion, blue eyes, black hair. In his figure, 
manner, and his whole bearing it was easy to see that he 
either came of a noble family, or that, from his earliest child- 
hood, he had been gently bred. If he was careful of his 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


15 


wardrobe, only taking last year’s clothes into daily wear, still 
upon occasion he could issue forth as a young man of fashion. 
Ordinarily he wore a shabby coat and waistcoat, the limp 
black cravat, untidily knotted, that students affect, trousers 
that matched the rest of his costume, and boots that had been 
re-soled. 

Vautrin (the man of forty with the dyed whiskers) marked 
a transition stage between these two young people and the 
others. He was the kind of man that calls forth the remark : 

‘ 1 He looks a jovial sort ! ” He had broad shoulders, a well- 
developed chest, muscular arms, and strong square-fisted 
hands ; the joints of his fingers were covered with tufts of 
fiery red hair. His face was furrowed by premature wrinkles; 
there was a certain hardness about it in spite of his bland and 
insinuating manner. His bass voice was by no means un- 
pleasant, and was in keeping with his boisterous laughter. 
He was always obliging, always in good spirits ; if anything 
went wrong with one of the locks, he would soon unscrew it, 
take it to pieces, file it, oil and clean and set it in order, and 
put it back in its place again : “ I am an old hand at it,” he 
used to say. Not only so, he knew all about ships, the sea, 
France, foreign countries, mhn, business, law, great houses 
and prisons — there was nothing that he did not know. If 
any one complained rather more than usual, he would offer 
his services at once. Fie had several times loaned money to 
Mme. Vauquer, or to the boarders ; but, somehow, those whom 
he obliged felt that they would sooner face death than fail to 
repay him ; a certain resolute look, sometimes seen on his 
face, inspired fear of him, for all his appearance of easy good- 
nature. In the way he spat there was an imperturbable cool- 
ness which seemed to indicate that this was a man who would 
not stop at a crime to extricate himself from a false position. 
His eyes, like those of a pitiless judge, seemed to go to the 
very bottom of all questions, to read all natures, all feelings, 
and thoughts. His habit of life was very regular ; he usually 


16 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


went out after breakfast, returning in time for dinner, and 
disappeared for the rest of the evening, letting himself in 
about midnight with a latch-key, a privilege that Mme. Vau- 
quer accorded to no other boarder. But then he was on very 
good terms with the widow; he used to call her “ mamma, 
and put his arm round her waist, a piece of flattery perhaps 
not appreciated to the full ! The worthy woman might im- 
agine this to be an easy feat ; but, as a matter of fact, no arm 
but Vautrin’s was long enough to encircle her. 

It was a characteristic trait of his generosity to pay fifteen 
francs a month for the cup of coffee with a dash of brandy in 
it, which he took after dinner. Less superficial observers 
than young men engulfed by the whirlpool of Parisian life, 
or old men, who took no interest in anything that did 
not directly concern them, would not have stopped short 
at the vaguely unsatisfactory impression that Vautrin made 
upon them. He knew or guessed the concerns of every one 
about him ; but none of them had been able to penetrate his 
thoughts, or to discover his occupation. He had deliberately 
made his apparent good-nature, his unfailing readiness to 
oblige, and his high spirits into a barrier between himself and 
the rest of them, but not seldom he gave glimpses of appalling 
depths of character. He seemed to delight in scourging the 
upper class of society with the lash of his tongue, to take 
pleasure in convicting it of inconsistency, in mocking at law 
and order with some grim jest worthy of Juvenal, as if some 
grudge against the social system rankled in him, as if there 
were some mystery carefully hidden away in his life. 

Mile. Taillefer felt attracted, perhaps unconsciously by the 
strength of the one man, and the good looks of the other; 
her stolen glances and secret thoughts were divided between 
them ; but neither of them seemed to take any notice of her, 
although some day a chance might alter her position and she 
would be a wealthy heiress. For that matter, there was not a 
soul in the house who took any trouble to investigate the vari* 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


17 


ous chronicles of misfortunes, real or imaginary, related by the 
rest. Each one regarded the others with indifference, tem- 
pered by suspicion ; it was the natural result of their relative 
positions. Practical assistance not one of them could give, 
this they all knew, and they had long since exhausted their 
stock of condolence over previous discussions of their griev- 
ances. They were in something the same position as an 
elderly couple who have nothing left to say to each other. 
The routine of existence kept them in contact, but they were 
parts of a mechanism which wanted oil. There was not one 
of them but would have passed a blind man begging in the 
street, not one that felt moved to pity by a tale of misfortune, 
not one that did not see in death the solution of the all-absorb- 
ing problem of misery which left them cold to the most 
terrible anguish in others. 

The happiest of these hapless beings was certainly Mme. 
Vauquer, who reigned supreme over this hospital supported by 
voluntary contributions. For her the little garden, which 
silence, and cold, and rain and drought combined to make as 
dreary as an Asian steppe , was a pleasant, shaded nook ; the 
gaunt yellow house, the musty odors of a back shop had 
charms for her, and for her alone. Those cells belonged to 
her. She fed those convicts condemned to penal servitude for 
life, and her authority was recognized among them. Where 
else in Paris would they have found wholesome food in suffi- 
cient quantity at the prices she charged them, and rooms 
which they were at liberty to make, if not exactly elegant 
or comfortable, at any rate, clean and healthy? If she had 
committed some flagrant act of injustice, the victim would 
have borne it in silence. 

Such a gathering contained, as might have been expected, 
the elements out of which a complete society might be con- 
structed. And, as in a school, as in the world itself, there 
was among the eighteen men and women who met round the 
dinner table a poor creature, despised by all the others, 
2 


18 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


condemned to be the butt of all their jokes. At the beginning 
of Eugene de Rastignac’s second twelvemonth, this figure 
suddenly started out into bold relief against the background 
of human forms and faces among which the law student was 
yet to live for another two years to come. This laughing- 
stock was the retired vermicelli-merchant, Father Goriot, 
upon whose face a painter, like the historian, would have 
concentrated all the light in his picture. 

How had it come about that the boarders regarded him 
with a half-malignant contempt ? Why did they subject the 
oldest among their number to a kind of persecution, in which 
there was mingled some pity, but no respect for his misfor- 
tunes? Had he brought it upon himself by some eccentricity 
or absurdity, which is less easily forgiven or forgotten than 
more serious defects? The question strikes at the root of 
many a social injustice. Perhaps it is only human nature to 
inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether 
by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer 
helplessness. Do we not, one and all, like to feel our strength 
even at the expense of some one or of something ? The 
poorest sample of humanity, the street arab, will pull the bell- 
handle at every street-door in bitter weather, and scramble 
up to write his name on the unsullied marble of a monument. 

In the year 1813, at the age of sixty-nine or thereabouts, 
“ Father Goriot ” had sold his business and retired — to Mme. 
Vauquer’s boarding-house. When he first came there he had 
taken the rooms now occupied by Mme. Couture ; he had 
paid twelve hundred francs a year like a man to whom five 
louis more or less was a mere trifle. For him Mme. Vauquer 
had made various improvements in the three rooms destined 
for his use, in consideration of a certain sum paid in advance, 
so it was said, for the miserable furniture, that is to say, for 
some yellow cotton curtains, a few chairs of stained wood 
covered with Utrecht velvet, several wretchedly colored prints 
in frames, and wall papers that a little suburban tavern would 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


19 


have disdained. Possibly it was the careless generosity with 
which Father Goriot allowed himself to be overreached at this 
period of his life (they called him Monsieur Goriot very 
respectfully then) that gave Mme. Vauquer the meanest 
opinion of his business abilities ; she looked on him as an 
imbecile where money was concerned. 

Goriot had brought with him a considerable wardrobe, the 
gorgeous outfit of a retired tradesman who denies himself 
nothing. Mme. Vauquer’s astonished eyes beheld no less 
than eighteen cambric-fronted shirts, the splendor of their 
fineness being enhanced by a pair of pins each bearing a large 
diamond, and connected by a short chain, an ornament which 
adorned the vermicelli-maker’s shirt-front. He usually wore 
a coat of cornflower blue ; his rotund and portly person 
was still further set off by a clean white waistcoat, and a gold 
chain and seals which dangled over that broad expanse. 
When his hostess accused him of being “a bit of a beau,” he 
smiled with the vanity of a citizen whose foible is gratified. 
His cupboards ( ormoires , as he called them in the popular 
dialect) were filled with a quantity of plate that he brought 
with him. The widow’s eyes gleamed as she obligingly helped 
him to unpack the soup ladles, tablespoons, forks, cruet-stands, 
tureens, dishes, and breakfast services — all of silver — which 
were duly arranged upon the shelves, beside a few more or less 
handsome pieces of plate, all weighing no inconsiderable 
number of ounces; he could not bring himself to part with 
these gifts that reminded him of past domestic festivals. 

“This was my wife’s present to me on the first anniversary 
of our wedding-day,” he said to Mme. Vauquer, as he put 
away a little silver posset dish, with two turtle-doves billing 
on the cover. “ Poor dear ! she spent on it all the money 
she had saved before we married. Do you know, I would 
sooner scratch the earth with my nails for a living, madame, 
than part with that. But I shall be able to take my coffee out 
of it every morning for the rest of my days, thank the Lord ! 


20 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


I am not to be pitied. There’s not much fear of my starv- 
ing for some time to come.” 

Finally, Mme. Vauquer’s magpie’s eye had discovered and 
read certain entries in the list of shareholders in the funds, 
and, after a rough calculation, was disposed to credit Goriot 
(worthy man) with something like ten thousand francs a year. 
From that day forward Mme. Vauquer ( nee de Conflans), 
who, as a matter of fact, had seen forty-eight summers, though 
she would only own to thirty-nine of them — Mme. Vauquer 
had her own ideas. Though Goriot’s eyes seemed to have 
shrunk in their sockets, though they were weak and watery, 
owing to some glandular affection which compelled him to 
wipe them continually, she considered him to be a very 
gentlemanly and pleasant-looking man. Moreover, the 
widow saw favorable indications of character in the well- 
developed calves of his legs and in his square-shaped nose, 
indications still further borne out by the worthy man’s full- 
moon countenance and look of stupid good-nature. This, in 
all probability, was a strongly-built animal, whose brains 
mostly consisted in a capacity for affection. His hair, worn 
“ pigeon winged,” and duly powdered every morning by the 
barber from the Ecole Poly technique, described five points 
on his low forehead, and made an elegant setting to his face. 
Though his manners were somewhat boorish, he was always 
as neat as a new pin, and he took his snuff in a lordly way, 
like a man who knows that his snuff-box is always likely to be 
filled with maccaboy; so that when Mme. Vauquer lay down 
to rest on the day of M. Goriot’s installation, her heart, like 
a larded partridge, sweltered before the fire of a burning 
desire to shake off the shroud of Vauquer and rise again as 
Goriot. She would marry again, sell her boarding-house, 
give her hand to this fine flower of citizenship, become a lady 
of consequence in the Quarter, and ask for subscriptions for 
charitable purposes ; she would make little Sunday excursions 
to Choisy, Soisy, Gentilly; she would have a box at the 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


21 


theatre when she liked, instead of waiting for the author’s 
tickets that one of her boarders sometimes gave her, in July ; 
the whole Eldorado of a little Parisian household rose up 
before Mme. Vauquer in her dreams. Nobody knew that she 
herself possessed forty thousand francs, accumulated sou by 
sou , that was her secret ; surely as far as money was concerned 
she was a very tolerable match. “And in other respects, I 
am quite his equal,” she said to herself, turning as if to assure 
herself of the charms of a form that the portly Sylvie found 
moulded in down feathers every morning. 

For three months from that day Mme. Veuve Vauquer 
availed herself of the services of M. Goriot’s coiffeur, and 
went to some expense over her toilet, expense justifiable on 
the ground that she owed it to herself and her establishment to 
pay some attention to appearances when such highly respectable 
persons honored her house with their presence. She expended 
no small amount of ingenuity in a sort of weeding process 
of her lodgers, announcing her intention of receiving hence- 
forward none but people who were in every way select. If a 
stranger presented himself, she let him know that M. Goriot, 
one of the best-known and most highly respected merchants 
in Paris, had singled out her boarding-house for a residence. 
She drew up a prospectus headed Maison Vauquer, in which 
it was asserted that hers was “ one of the oldest and most highly 

recommended boarding- houses in the Latin Quarter From 

the windows of the house,” thus ran the prospectus, “ there 
is a charming view of the Vallee des Gobelins (so there is — 
from the fourth floor), and a beautiful garden, extending down 
to an avenue of lindens at the farther end.” Mention was 
made of the bracing air of the place and its quiet situation. 

It was this prospectus that attracted Mme. la Comtesse de 
l’Ambermesnil, a widow of six and thirty, who was awaiting 
the final settlement of her husband’s affairs, and of another 
matter regarding a pension due to her as the wife of a general 
who had died “ on the field of battle,” On this Mme. Vau- 


22 


FATHER GORIOT. 


quer saw to her table, lighted a fire daily in the sitting-room 
for nearly six months, and kept the promise of her prospectus, 
even going to some expense to do so. And the Countess, on 
her side, addressed Mine. Vauquer as “my dear,” and prom- 
ised her two more boarders, the Baronne de Vaumerland and 
the widow of a colonel, the late Comte de Picquoisie, who 
were about to leave a boarding-house in the Marais, where the 
terms were higher than at the Maison Vauquer. Both these 
ladies, moreover, would be very well to do when the people 
at the War Office had come to an end of their formalities. 
“But government departments are always so dilatory,” the 
lady added. 

After dinner the two widows went together up to Mme. 
Vauquer’s room, and had a snug little chat over some cordial 
and various delicacies reserved for the mistress of the house. 
Mme. Vauquer’s ideas as to Goriot were cordially approved 
by Mme. de l’Ambermesnil ; it was a capital notion, which 
for that matter she had guessed from the very first ; in her 
opinion the vermicelli-maker was an excellent man. 

“ Ah ! my dear lady, such a well-preserved man of his age, 
as sound as my eyesight — a man who might make a woman 
happy ! ” said the widow. 

The good-natured Countess turned to the subject of Mme. 
Vauquer’s dress, which was not in harmony with her projects. 
“ You must put yourself on a war footing,” said she. 

After much serious consideration the two widows went 
shopping together — they purchased a hat adorned with ostrich 
feathers and a cap at the Palais Royal, and the Countess took 
her friend to the Magasin de la Petite Jeannette, where they 
chose a dress and a scarf. Thus equipped for the campaign, 
the widow looked exactly like the prize animal hung out for 
a sign above an a la mode beef-shop ; but she herself was so 
much pleased with the improvement, as she considered it, in 
her appearance, that she felt that she lay under some obliga- 
tion to the Countess; and, though by no means open-handed, 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


23 


she begged that lady to accept a hat that cost twenty francs. 
The fact was that she needed the Countess’ services on the 
delicate mission of sounding Goriot ; the Countess must sing 
her praises in his ears. Mme. de Ambermesnil lent herself 
very good-naturedly to this manoeuvre, began her operations, 
and succeeded in obtaining a private interview ; but the over- 
tures that she made, with a view to securing him for herself, 
were received with embarrassment, not to say a repulse. She 
left him, revolted by his coarseness. 

“ My angel,” said she to her dear friend, “ you will make 
nothing of that man yonder. He is absurdly suspicious, and 
he is a mean curmudgeon, an idiot, a fool ; you would never 
be happy with him.” 

After what had passed between M. Goriot and Mme. de 
1’ Ambermesnil, the Countess would no longer live under the 
same roof. She left the next day, forgot to pay for six 
months’ board, and left behind her her wardrobe, cast-off 
clothing to the value of five francs. Eagerly and persistently 
as Mme. Vauquer sought her quondam lodger, the Comtesse 
de l’Ambermesnil was never heard of again in Paris. The 
widow often talked of this deplorable business, and regretted 
her own too confiding disposition. As a matter of fact, she 
was as suspicious as a cat ; but she was like many other 
people, who cannot trust their own kin and put themselves at 
the mercy of the next chance comer — an odd but common 
phenomenon, whose causes may readily be traced to the 
depths of the human heart. 

Perhaps there are people who know that they have nothing 
more to look for from those with whom they live ; they have 
shown the emptiness of their hearts to their housemates, and 
in their secret selves they are conscious that they are severely 
judged, and that they deserve to be judged severely ; but still 
they feel an unconquerable craving for praises that they do 
not hear, or they are consumed by a desire to appear to 
possess, in the eyes of a new audience, the qualities which 


24 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


they have not, hoping to win the admiration or affection of 
strangers at the risk of forfeiting it again some day. Or, once 
more, there are other mercenary natures who never do a kind- 
ness to a friend or a relation simply because these have a 
claim upon them, while a service done to a stranger brings its 
reward to self-love. Such natures feel but little affection for 
those who are nearest to them ; they keep their kindness for 
remoter circles of acquaintance, and show most to those who 
dwell on its utmost limits. Mine. Vauquer belonged to both 
these essentially mean, false, and execrable classes. 

“ If I had been here at the time,” Vautrin would say at the 
end of the story, “ I would have shown her up, and that mis- 
fortune would not have befallen you. I know that kind of 
phiz ! ” 

Like all narrow natures, Mme. Vauquer was wont to confine 
her attention to events, and did not go very deeply into the 
causes that brought them about ; she likewise preferred to 
throw the blame of her own mistakes on other people, so she 
chose to consider that the honest vermicelli-maker was respon- 
sible for her misfortune. It had opened her eyes, so she said, 
with regard to him. As soon as she saw that her blandish- 
ments were in vain, and that her outlay on her toilet' was 
money thrown away, she was not slow to discover the reason 
of his indifference. It became plain to her at once that there 
was some other attraction , to use her own expression.. In 
short, it was evident that the hope she had so fondly cherished 
was a baseless delusion, and that she would “ never make 
anything out of that man yonder,” in the Countess’ forcible 
phrase. The Countess seemed to have been a judge of char- 
acter. Mme. Vauquer’s aversion was naturally more energetic 
than her friendship, for her hatred was not in proportion to 
her love, but to her disappointed expectations. The human 
heart may find here and there a resting-place short of the 
highest height of affection, but we seldom stop in the steep, 
downward slope of hatred. Still, M. Goriot was a lodger, 


FATHER GO RIOT 


25 


and the widow’s wounded self-love could not vent itself in an 
explosion of wrath ; like a monk harassed by the prior of his 
convent, she was forced to stifle her sighs of disappointment, 
and to gulp down her cravings for revenge. Little minds find 
gratification for their feelings, benevolent or otherwise, by a 
constant exercise of petty ingenuity. The widow employed 
her woman’s malice to devise a system of covert persecution. 
She began by a course of retrenchment — various luxuries 
which had found their way to the table appeared there no 
more. 

“No more gherkins, no more anchovies; they have made 
a fool of me! ” she said to Sylvie one morning, and they re- 
turned to the old bill of fare. 

The thrifty frugality necessary to those who mean to make 
their way in the world had become an inveterate habit of life 
with M. Goriot. Soup, boiled beef, and a dish of vegetables 
had been, and always would be, the dinner he liked best, so 
Mine. Vauquer found it very difficult to annoy a boarder 
whose tastes were so simple. He was proof against her 
malice, and in desperation she spoke to him and of him 
slightingly before the other lodgers, who began to amuse 
themselves greatly at his expense, and so deeply graitfied her 
desire for revenge. 

Towards the end of the first year the widow’s suspicions 
had reached such a pitch that she began to wonder how it was 
that a retired merchant with a secure income of seven or eight 
thousand livres, the owner of such magnificent plate and 
jewelry handsome enough for a kept mistress, should be 
living in her house. Why should he devote so small a 
proportion of his money to his expenses ? Until the first year 
was nearly at an end, Goriot had dined out once or twice 
every week, but these occasions came less frequently, and at 
last he was scarcely absent from the dinner table twice a 
month. It was hardly to be expected that Mme. Vauquer 
should regard the increased regularity of her boarder’s habits 


26 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


with complacency, when those little excursions of his had been 
so much to her interest. She attributed the change not so 
much to a gradual diminution of fortune as to a spiteful wish 
to annoy his hostess. It is one of the most detestable habits 
of a liliputian mind to credit other people with its own 
malignant pettiness. 

Unluckily, towards the end of the second year, M. Goriot’s 
conduct gave some color to the idle talk about him. He 
asked Mme. Vauquer to give him a room on the third floor, 
and to make a corresponding reduction in her charges. Ap- 
parently, such strict economy was called for, that he did with- 
out a fire all through the winter. Madame Vauquer asked to 
be paid in advance, an arrangement to which M. Goriot con- 
sented, and thenceforward she always spoke of him as “ old 
Goriot.” 

What had brought about this decline and fall ? Conjecture 
was keen, but investigation was difficult. Father Goriot was 
not communicative ; in the sham Countess’ phrase, he was “ a 
curmudgeon.” Empty-headed people who babble about their 
own affairs because they have nothing else to occupy them, 
naturally conclude that if people say nothing of their doings it 
is because their doings will not bear being talked about ; so 
the highly respectable merchant became a scoundrel, and the 
late beau was an old rogue. Opinion fluctuated. Sometimes, 
according to Vautrin, who came about this time to live in 
the Maison Vauquer, Father Goriot was a man who went on 
’Change and dabbled (to use the sufficiently expressive language 
of the Stock Exchange) in stocks and shares after he had 
ruined himself by heavy speculation. Sometimes it was held 
that he was one of those petty gamblers who nightly play for 
small stakes until they win a few francs. A theory that he 
was a detective in the employ of the Home Office found favor 
at one time, but Vautrin urged that “ Goriot was not sharp 
enough for one of that sort.” There were yet other solutions ; 
Father Goriot was a skinflint, a shark of a money-lender, a man 


FATHER GO RIOT 


27 


who lived by selling lottery tickets. He was by turns all the 
most mysterious brood of vice and shame and misery; yet, 
however vile his life might be, the feeling of repulsion which 
he aroused in others was not so strong that he must be ban- 
ished from their society — he paid his way. Besides, Goriot 
had his uses, every one vented his spleen or sharpened his wit 
on him ; he was pelted with jokes and belabored with hard 
words. 1 he general consensus of opinion was in favor of a 
theory which seemed the most likely; this was Mine. Vau- 
quer’s view. According to her, the man so well preserved at 
his time of life, as sound as her eyesight, with whom a woman 
might be very happy, was a libertine who had strange tastes. 
These are the facts upon which Mme. Vauquer’s slanders were 
based. 

Early one morning, some few months after the departure 
of the unlucky Countess who had managed to live for six 
months at the widow’s expense, Mme. Vauquer (not yet 
dressed) heard the rustle of a silk dress and a young woman’s 
light footstep on the stair ; some one was going to Goriot’s 
room. He seemed to expect the visit, for his door stood ajar. 
The portly Sylvie presently came up to tell her mistress that 
a girl too pretty to be honest, “dressed like a goddess,” and 
not a speck of mud on her laced cashmere boots, had glided 
in from the street like a snake, had found the kitchen, and 
asked for M. Goriot’s room. Mme. Vauquer and the cook, 
listening, overheard several words affectionately spoken during 
the visit, which lasted for some time. When M. Goriot went 
downstairs w r ith the lady, the stout Sylvie forthwith took her 
basket and followed the lover-like couple, under pretext of 
going to do her marketing. 

“ M. Goriot must be awfully rich, all the same, madame,” 
she reported on her return, “ to keep her in such style. Just 
imagine it ! . There was a splendid carriage waiting at the 
corner of the Place de l’Estrapade, and she got into it.” 

While they were at dinner that evening, Mme. Vauquer 


28 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


went to the window and drew the curtain, as the sun was 
shining into Goriot’s eyes. 

“ You are beloved of fair ladies, M. Goriot — the sun seeks 
you out,” she said, alluding to his visitor. “Pcste ! you have 
good taste ; she was very pretty.” 

“ That was my daughter,” he said, with a kind of pride in 
his voice, and the rest chose to consider this as the fatuity of 
an old man who wishes to save appearances. 

A month after this visit M. Goriot received another. The 
same daughter who had come to see him that morning came 
again after dinner, this time in evening dress. The boarders, 
in deep discussion in the dining-room, caught a glimpe of a 
lovely, fair-haired woman, slender, graceful, and much too 
distinguished-looking to be a daughter of Father Goriot. 

“Two of them!” cried the portly Sylvie, who did not 
recognize the lady of the first visit. 

A few days later, and another young lady — a tall, well- 
moulded brunette, with dark hair and bright eyes — came to 
ask for M. Goriot. 

“ Three of them ! ” said Sylvie. 

Then the second daughter, who had first come in the morn- 
ing to see her father, came shortly afterwards in the evening. 
She wore a ball dress, and came in a carriage. 

“ Four of them ! ” commented Mme. Vauquer and her 
plump handmaid. Sylvie saw not a trace of resemblance 
between this great lady and the girl in her simple morning 
dress who had entered her kitchen on the occasion of her 
first visit. 

At that time Goriot was paying twelve hundred francs a 
year to his landlady, and Mme. Vauquer saw nothing out of 
the common in the fact that a rich man had four or five mis- 
tresses ; nay, she thought it very knowing of him to pass them 
off as his daughters. She was not at all inclined to draw a 
hard-and-fast line, or to take umbrage at his sending for them ' 
to the Maison Vauquer; yet, inasmuch as these visits ex- 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


39 


plained her boarder’s indifference to her, she went so far (at 
the end of the second year) as to speak of him as an “ ugly 
old wretch.” When at length her boarder declined to nine 
hundred francs a year, she asked him very insolently what he 
took her house to be, after meeting one of these ladies on the 
stairs. Father Goriot answered that the lady was his eldest 
daughter. 

“ So you have two or three dozen daughters, have you?” 
said Mme. Vanquer sharply. 

“I have only two,” her boarder answered meekly, like a 
ruined man who is broken in to all the cruel usage of mis- 
fortune. 

Towards the end of the third year Father Goriot reduced his 
expenses still further; he went up to the third story, and now 
paid forty-five francs a month. He did without snuff, told 
his hairdresser that he no longer required his services, and 
gave up wearing powder. When Goriot appeared for the first 
time in this condition, an exclamation of astonishment broke 
from his hostess at the color of his hair — a dingy olive gray. 
He had grown sadder day by day under the influence of some 
hidden trouble ; among all the faces round the table, his was 
the most woe-begone. There was no longer any doubt. Go- 
riot was an elderly libertine, whose eyes had only been pre- 
served by the skill of the physician from the malign influence 
of the remedies necessitated by the state of his health. The 
disgusting color of his hair was a result of his excesses, and 
of the drugs which he had taken that he might continue his 
career. The poor old man’s mental and physical condition 
afforded some ground for the absurd rubbish talked about 
him. When his outfit was worn out, he replaced the fine 
linen by calico at fourteen sous the ell. His diamonds, his 
old snuff-box, watch-chain and trinkets, disappeared one by 
one. He had left off wearing the cornflower blue coat, and 
was sumptuously arrayed, summer as winter, in a coarse chest- 


30 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


nut-brown coat, a plush waistcoat, and doeskin breeches. He 
grew thinner and thinner ; his legs were shrunken, his cheeks, 
once so puffed out by contented bourgeois prosperity, were 
covered with wrinkles, and the outlines of the jawbones were 
distinctly visible ; there were deep furrows in his torehead. 
In the fourth year of his residence in the Rue Neuve-Sainte- 
Genevieve he was no longer like his former self, dhe hale 
vermicelli manufacturer, sixty-two years of age, who had 
looked scarce forty, the stout, comfortable, prosperous trades- 
man, with an almost bucolic air, and such a brisk demeanor 
that it did you good to look at him ; the man with something 
boyish in his smile, had suddenly sunk into his dotage, and 
had become a feeble, vacillating septuagenarian. 

The keen, bright blue eyes had grown dull, and faded to a 
steel-gray color ; the red inflamed rims looked as though they 
had shed tears of blood. He excited feelings of repulsion in 
some, and of pity in others. The young medical students 
who came to the house noticed the drooping of his lower lip 
and the conformation of the facial angle; and, after teasing 
him for some time to no purpose, they declared that cretinism 
was setting in. 

One evening after dinner Mme. Vauquer said balf-banter- 
ingly to him, “So those daughters of yours don’t come to 
see you any more, eh?” meaning to imply her doubts as to 
his paternity; but Father Goriot shrank as if his hostess had 
touched him with a sword-point. 

“They come sometimes,” he said in a tremulous voice. 

“ Aha ! you still see them sometimes ? ” cried the students. 
“ Bravo, Father Goriot ! ” 

The old man scarcely seemed to hear the witticisms at his 
expense that followed on the words ; he had relapsed into the 
dreamy state of mind that these superficial observers took for 
senile torpor, due to his lack of intelligence. If they had 
only known, they might have been deeply interested by the 
problem of his condition ; but few problems were more 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


31 


obscure. It was easy, of course, to find out whether Goriot 
had really been a vermicelli manufacturer ; the amount of his 
fortune was readily discoverable ; but the old people, who 
were most inquisitive as to his concerns, never went beyond 
the limits of the Quarter, and lived in the lodging-house 
much as oysters cling to a rock. As for the rest, the current 
of life in Paris daily awaited them, and swept them away with 
it ; so soon as they left the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve, they 
forgot the existence of the old man, their butt at dinner. For 
those narrow souls, or for careless youth, the misery in Father 
Goriot’ s withered face and its dull apathy were quite incom- 
patible with wealth or any sort of intelligence. As for the 
creatures whom he called his daughters, all Mme. Vauquer’s 
boarders were of her opinion. With the faculty for severe 
logic sedulously cultivated by elderly women during long 
evenings of gossip till they can always find an hypothesis to 
fit all circumstances, she was wont to reason thus — 

“ If Father Goriot had daughters of his own as rich as those 
ladies who came here seemed to be, he would not be lodging 
in my house, on the fourth floor, at forty-five francs a month ; 
and he would not go about dressed like a poor man.” 

No objection could be raised to these inferences. So by 
the end of the month of November, 1819, at the time when 
the curtain rises on this drama, every one in the house had 
come to have a very decided opinion as to the poor old man. 
He had never had either wife or daughter; excesses had 
reduced him to this sluggish condition ; he was a sort of 
human mollusc who should be classed among the capu lidce, so 
said one of the dinner contingent, an employe at the Museum, 
who had a pretty wit of his own. Poiret was an eagle, a 
gentleman, compared with Goriot. Poiret would join the 
talk, argue, answer when he was spoken to ; as a matter of 
fact, his talk, arguments, and responses contributed nothing 
to the conversation, for Poiret had a habit of repeating what 
the others said in different words ; still, he did join in the 


32 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


talk \ he was alive, and seemed capable of feeling ; while 
Father Goriot (to quote the Museum official again) was invari- 
ably at zero — Reaumur. 

Eugene de Rastignac had just returned to Paris in a 
state of mind not unknown to young men who are conscious 
of unusual powers, and to those whose faculties are so stim- 
ulated by a difficult position, that for the time being they rise 
above the ordinary level. 

Rastignac’s first year of study for the preliminary exam- 
inations in law had left him free to see the sights of Paris 
and to enjoy some of its amusements. A student has 
not much time on his hands if he sets himself to learn the 
repertory of every theatre, and to study the ins and outs 
of the labyrinth of Paris. To know its customs ; to learn 
the language, and become familiar with the amusements of 
the capital, he must explore its recesses, good and bad, follow 
the studies that please him best, and form some idea of the 
treasures contained in galleries and museums. 

At this stage of his career a student grows eager and excited 
about all sorts of follies that seem to him to be of immense 
importance. He has his hero, his great man, a professor at 
the College de France, paid to talk down to the level of his 
audience. He adjusts his cravat, and strikes various atti- 
tudes for the benefit of the women in the first galleries at 
the Opera-Comique. As he passes through all these suc- 
cessive initiations, and breaks out of his sheath, the horizons 
of life widen around him, and at length he grasps the plan 
of society with the different human strata of which it is 
composed. 

If he begins by admiring the procession of carriages on 
sunny afternoons in the Champs-Elysees, he soon reaches 
the further stage of envying their owners. Unconsciously, 
Eugene had served his apprenticeship before he went back 
to Angouleme for the long vacation after taking his degrees 
as bachelor of arts and bachelor of law. The illusions of 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


S3 


childhood had vanished, so also had the ideas he brought with 
him from the provinces ; he had returned thither with an intel- 
ligence developed, with loftier ambitions, and saw things as 
they were at home in the old manor house. His father and 
mother, his two brothers and two sisters, with an aged aunt, 
whose whole fortune consisted in annuities, lived on the little 
estate of Rastignac. The whole property brought in about 
three thousand francs ; and though the amount varied with 
the season (as must always be the case in a vine-growing 
district), they were obliged to spare an unvarying twelve hun- 
dred francs out of their income for him. He saw how con- 
stantly the poverty, which they had generously hidden from 
him, weighed upon them ; he could not help comparing the 
sisters, who had seemed so beautiful to his boyish eyes, with 
women in Paris, who had realized the beauty of his dreams. 
The uncertain future of the whole family depended upon him. 
It did not escape his eyes that not a crumb was wasted in the 
house, nor that the wine they drank was made from the second 
pressing; a multitude of small things, which it is useless to 
speak of in detail here, made him burn to distinguish himself, 
and his ambition to succeed increased tenfold. 

He meant, like all great souls, that his success should be 
owing entirely to his merits ; but his was pre-eminently a 
southern temperament, the execution of his plans was sure to 
be marred by the vertigo that seizes on youth when youth 
sees itself alone in a wide sea, uncertain how to spend its 
energies, whither to steer its course, how to adapt its sails to 
the winds. At first he determined to fling himself heart and 
soul into his work, but he was diverted from this purpose by 
the need of society and connections ; then he saw how great 
an influence women exert in social life, and suddenly made 
up his mind to go out into this world to seek a protectress 
there. Surely a clever and high-spirited young man, whose 
wit and courage were set off to advantage by a graceful 
figure, and the vigorous kind of beauty that readily strikes 
3 


34 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


a woman’s imagination, need not despair of finding a pro- 
tectress. These ideas occurred to him in his country walks 
with his sisters, whom he had once joined so gaily. The 
girls thought him very much changed. 

His aunt, Mme. de Marcillac, had been presented at court, 
and had moved among the highest heights of that lofty region. 
Suddenly the young man’s ambition discerned in those recol- 
lections of hers, which had been like nursery fairy tales to her 
nephews and nieces, the elements of a social success at least 
as important as the success which he had achieved at the 
Ecole de droit. He began to ask his aunt about those rela- 
tions; some of the old ties might still hold good. After much 
shaking of the branches of the family tree, the old lady came 
to the conclusion that of all persons who could be useful to 
her nephew among the selfish genius of rich relations, the 
Vicomtesse de Beauseant was the least likely to refuse. To 
this lady, therefore, she wrote in the old-fashioned style, 
recommending Eugene to her ; pointing out to her nephew 
that if he succeeded in pleasing Mme. de Beauseant, the 
Vicomtesse would introduce him to other relations. A few 
days after his return to Paris, therefore, Rastignac sent his 
aunt’s letter to Mme. de Beauseant. The Vicomtesse replied 
by an invitation to a ball for the following evening. This 
was the position of affairs at the Maison Vauquer at the end 
of November, 1819. 

A few days later, after Mme. de Beauseant’s ball, Eugene 
came in at two o’clock in the morning. The persevering 
student meant to make up for the lost time by working until 
daylight. It was the first time that he had attempted to 
spend the night in this way in that silent quarter. The spell 
of a factitious energy was upon him ; he had beheld the pomp 
and splendor of the world. He had not dined at the Maison 
Vauquer ; the boarders probably would think that he would 
walk home at daybreak from the dance, as he had done some- 
times on former occasions, after a fete at the Prado, or a ball 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


35 


at the Odeon, splashing his silk stockings thereby, and ruining 
his pumps. 

It so happened that Christophe took a look into the street 
before drawing the bolts of the door ; and Rastignac, coming 
in at that moment, could go up to his room without making 
any noise, followed by Christophe, who made a great deal. 
Eugene exchanged his dress suit for a shabby overcoat and 
slippers, kindled a fire with some blocks of patent fuel, and 
prepared for his night’s work in such a way that the faint 
sounds he made were drowned by Christophe’s heavy tramp 
on the stairs. 

Eugene sat absorbed in thought for a few moments before 
plunging into his law books. He had just become aware of 
the fact that the Vicomtesse de Beauseant was one of the 
queens of fashion, that her house was thought to be the pleas- 
antest in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. And not only so, she 
was, by right of her fortune, and the name she bore, one of 
the most conspicuous figures in that aristocratic world. 
Thanks to his aunt, thanks to Mme. de Marcillac’s letter of 
introduction, the poor student had been kindly received in 
that house before he knew the extent of the favor thus shown 
to him. It was almost like a patent of nobility to be admitted 
to those gilded salons ; he had appeared in the most exclusive 
circle in Paris, and now all doors were open for him. Eugene 
had been dazzled at first by the brilliant assembly, and had 
scarcely exchanged a few words with the Vicomtesse ; he had 
been content to single out a goddess from among this throng 
of Parisian divinities, one of those women who are sure to 
attract a young man’s fancy. 

The Comtesse Anastasie de Restaud was tall and gracefully 
made ; she had one of the prettiest figures in Paris. Imagine 
a pair of great dark eyes, a magnificently moulded hand, a 
shapely foot. There was a fiery energy in her movements ; 
the Marquis de Ronquerolles had called her a “ thorough- 
bred,” but this fineness of nervous organization had brought 


36 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


no accompanying defect ; the outlines of her form were full 
and rounded, without any tendency to stoutness. “A thor- 
oughbred/’ “a pure pedigree,” these figures of speech have 
replaced the “heavenly angel” and Ossianic nomenclatuie \ 
the old mythology of love is extinct, doomed to perish by 
modern dandyism. But for Rastignac, Mme. Anastasie de 
Restaud was the woman for whom he had sighed. He had 
contrived to write his name twice upon the list of partners 
upon her fan, and had snatched a few words with her during 
the first quadrille. 

“Where shall I meet you again, madame?” he asked 
abruptly, and the tones of his voice were full of the vehement 
energy that women like so well. 

“ Oh, everywhere ! ” said she, “ in the Bois, at the Bouf- 
fons, in my own house.” 

With the impetuosity of his adventurous southern temper, 
he did all he could to cultivate an acquaintance with this 
lovely Countess, making the best of his opportunities in the 
quadrille and during a waltz that she gave him. When he 
had told her that he was a cousin of Mme. de Beauseant, 
the Countess, whom he took for a great lady, asked him to 
call at her house, and, after her parting smile, Rastignac felt 
convinced that he must make this visit. He was so lucky as 
to light upon some one who did not laugh at his ignorance, 
a fatal defect among the gilded and insolent youth of that 
period ; the coterie of Maulincourts, Maximes de Trailles, de 
Marsays, Ronquerolles, Ajuda-Pintos, and Vandenesses, who 
shone there in all the glory of coxcombry among the best- 
dressed women of fashion in Paris — Lady Brandon, the Duchesse 
de Langeais, the Comtesse de Kergarouet, Mme. de Serizy, 
the Duchesse de Carigliano, the Comtesse Ferraud, Mme. de 
Lanty, the Marquise d’Aiglemont, Mme. Firmiani, the Mar- 
quise de Listomere and the Marquise d’Espard, the Duchesse 
de Maufrigneuse and the Grandlieus. Luckily, therefore, for 
him, the novice happened upon the Marquis de Montriveau, 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


37 


the lover of the Duchesse de Langeais, a general as simple as a 
child ; from him Rastignac learned that the Comtesse lived in 
the Rue du Helder. 

Ah, what it is to be young, eager to see the world, greedily 
on the watch for any chance that brings you nearer the woman 
of your dreams, and behold two houses open their doors to 
you ! To set foot in the Vicomtesse de Beauseant’s house in 
the Faubourg Saint-Germain ; to fall on your knees before a 
Comtesse de Restaud in the Chaussee d’Antin ; to look at 
one glance across a vista of Paris drawing-rooms, conscious 
that, possessing sufficient good looks, you may hope to find 
aid and protection there in a feminine heart ! To feel ambi- 
tious enough to spurn the tight-rope on which you must walk 
with the steady head of an acrobat for whom a fall is impossi- 
ble, and to find in a charming woman the best of all balancing 
poles. 

He sat there with his thoughts for a while, law on the one 
hand and poverty on the other, beholding a radiant vision 
of a woman rise above the dull, smoldering fire. Who would 
not have paused and questioned the future as Eugene was do- 
ing ? who would not have pictured it full of success ? His 
wandering thoughts took wings ; he was transported out of 
the present into that blissful future ; he was sitting by Mme. 
de Restaud’s side, when a sort of sigh, like the grunt of an 
overburdened St. Joseph, broke the silence of the night. It 
vibrated through the student, who took the sound for a death- 
groan. He opened his door noiselessly, went out upon the 
landing, and saw a thin streak of light under Father Goriot’s 
door. Eugene feared that his neighbor had been taken ill ; 
he went over and looked through the key-hole ; the old man 
was busily engaged in an occupation so singular and so sus- 
picious that Rastignac thought he was only doing a piece of 
necessary service to society to watch the self-styled vermicelli- 
maker’s nocturnal industries. 

The table was upturned, and Goriot had doubtless in some 


38 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


way secured a silver plate and cup to the bar before knotting 
a thick rope round them ; he was pulling at this rope with 
such enormous force that they were being crushed and twisted 
out of shape ; to all appearance he meant to convert the 
richly wrought metal into ingots. 

“ Peste / what a man!” said Rastignac, as he watched 
Goriot’s muscular arms ; there was not a sound in the room 
while the old man, with the aid of the rope, was kneading the 
silver like dough. “ Was he, then, indeed, a thief, or a receiver 
of stolen goods, who affected imbecility and decrepitude, and 
lived like a beggar that he might carry on his pursuits the 
more securely? ” Eugene stood for a moment revolving these 
questions in his mind, then he looked again through the 
keyhole as before. 

Father Goriot had unwound his coil of rope ; he had covered 
the table with a blanket, and was now employed in rolling the 
flattened mass of silver into a bar, an operation which he per- 
formed with marvelous dexterity. 

“ Why, he must be as strong as Augustus, King of Poland ! ” 
said Eugene to himself when the bar was nearly finished. 

Father Goriot looked sadly at his handiwork, tears fell from 
his eyes, he blew out the dip which had served him for a light 
while he manipulated the silver, and Eugene heard him sigh 
as he lay down again. 

“ He is mad,” thought the student. 

** Poor child ! ” Father Goriot said aloud. Rastignac, hear- 
ing those words, concluded to keep silence; he would not hastily 
condemn his neighbor. He was just in the doorway of his 
room when a strange sound from the staircase below reached 
his ears ; it might have been made by two men coming up in 
list slippers. Eugene listened ; two men there certainly were, 
he could hear their breathing. Yet there had been no sound 
of opening the street-door, no footsteps in the passage. Sud- 
denly, too, he saw a faint gleam of light on the second story ; 
it came from M. Vautrin’s room. 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


39 


“ There are a good many mysteries here for a lodging- 
house ! ” he said to himself. 

He went part of the way downstairs and listened again. 
The rattle of gold reached his ears. In another moment the 
light was put out, and again he distinctly heard the breathing 
of two men, but no sound of a door being opened or shut. 
The two men went downstairs, the faint sounds growing 
fainter as they went. 

“ Who is there? ” cried Mine. Vauquer out of her bedroom 
window, she having heard slight sounds of the departing 
footsteps and the closing of the outer door. 

“ I, Mme. Vauquer,” answered Vautrin’s deep bass voice. 
“ I am coming in.” 

“That is odd ! Christophe drew the bolts,” said Eugene, 
going back to his room. “ You have to sit up at night, it 
seems, if you really mean to know all that is going on about 
you in Paris.” 

These incidents turned his thoughts from his ambitious 
dreams ; he betook himself to his work, but his thoughts wan- 
dered back to Father Goriot’s suspicious occupation ; Mme. 
de Restaud’s face swam again and again before his eyes like a 
vision of a brilliant future, and at last he lay down and slept 
with clenched fists. When a young man makes up his mind 
that he will work all night, the chances are that seven times 
out of ten he will sleep till morning. Such vigils do not 
begin before we are turned twenty. 

The next morning Paris was wrapped in one of the dense 
fogs that throw the most punctual people out in their calcula- 
tions as to the time \ even the most business-like folk fail to 
keep their appointments in such weather, and ordinary mortals 
wake up at noon and fancy it is eight o’clock. On this morn- 
ing it was half-past nine, and Mme. Vauquer still lay abed. 
Christophe was late, Sylvie was late, but the two sat comfort- 
ably taking their coffee as usual. It was Sylvie’s custom to 
take the cream off the milk destined for the boarders’ break- 


40 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


fast for her own, and to boil the remainder for some time, so 
that madame should not discover this illegal exaction. 

“Sylvie,” said Christophe, as he dipped a piece of toast 
into the coffee, “ M. Vautrin, who is not such a bad sort, all 
the same, had two people come to see him again last night. 
If madame says anything, mind you say nothing about it.” 

“ Has he given you something? ” 

“He gave me a five-franc piece this month, which is as 
good as saying, ‘ Hold your tongue.’ ” 

“Except him and Mme. Couture, who don’t look twice at 
every penny, there’s no one in the house that doesn’t try to 
get back with the left hand all that they give with the right at 
New Year,” said Sylvie. 

“ And, after all,” said Christophe, “ what do they give you ? 
A miserable five-franc piece. There is Father Goriot, who 
has cleaned his shoes himself these two years past. There is 
that old beggar Poiret, who goes without blacking altogether ; 
he would sooner drink it than put it on his boots. Then there 
is that whipper-snapper of a student, who gives me a couple 
of francs. Two francs will not pay for my brushes, and he 
sells his old clothes, and gets more for them than they are 
worth. Oh! they’re a shabby lot ! ” 

“Pooh! ” said Sylvie, sipping her coffee, “our places are 
the best in the Quarter, that I know. But about that great big 
chap Vautrin, Christophe; has any one told you anything 
about him ? ” 

“ Yes. I met a gentleman in the street a few days ago ; he 
said to me, ‘There’s a gentleman at your place, isn’t there? 
a tall man that dyes his whiskers?’ I told him, ‘No, 
sir; they aren’t dyed. A gay fellow like him hasn’t the 
time to do it.’ And when I told M. Vautrin about it after- 
wards, he said, ‘ Quite right, my boy. That is the way to 
answer them. There is nothing more unpleasant than to have 
your little weaknesses known ; it might spoil many a match.’ ” 

“Well, and for my part,” said Sylvie, “a man tried to 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


41 


humbug me at the market wanting to know if I had seen him 
put on his shirt. Such bosh ! There,” she cried, interrupt- 
ing herself, “that’s a quarter to ten striking at the Val-de- 
Grace, and not a soul stirring ! ” 

“Pooh! they are all gone out. Mme. Couture and the 
girl went out at eight o’clock to take the wafer at Saint- 
Etienne. Father Goriot started off somewhere with a parcel, 
and the student won’t be back from his lecture till ten o’clock. 
I saw them go while I was sweeping the stairs ; Father Goriot 
knocked up against me, and his parcel was as hard as iron. 
What is the old fellow up to I wonder? He is as good as a 
plaything for the rest of them ; they can never let him alone; 
but he is a good man, all the same, and worth more than all 
of them put together. He doesn’t give you much himself, 
but he sometimes sends you with a message to ladies who fork 
out famous tips; they are dressed grandly, too.” 

“His daughters, as he calls them, eh? There are a dozen 
of them.” 

“ I have never been to more than two — the two who came 
here.” 

“ There is madame moving overhead ; I shall have to go, 
or she will raise a fine racket. Just keep an eye on the milk, 
Christophe ! don’t let the cat get at it.” 

Sylvie went up to her mistress’ room. 

“Sylvie ! How is this? It’s nearly ten o’clock, and you 
let me sleep on like a dormouse ! Such a thing has never 
happened before.” 

“It is the fog; it is that thick, you could cut it with a 
knife.” 

“But how about breakfast?” 

“ Bah ! the boarders are possessed, I’m sure. They all 
cleared out before there was a wink of daylight.” 

“Do speak properly, Sylvie,” Mme. Vauquer retorted; 
“say a blink of daylight.” 

“ Ah, well, madame, whichever you please. Anyhow, you 


42 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


can have breakfast at ten o’clock. La Michonnette and 
Poireau have neither of them stirred. There are only those 
two upstairs, and they are sleeping like the logs they are.” 

“ But, Sylvie, you put their names together as if ” 

“As if what ? ” said Sylvie, bursting into a guffaw. “ The 
two of them make a pair.” 

“It is a strange thing, isn’t it, Sylvie, how M. Vautrin got 
in last night after Christophe had bolted the door? ” 

“ Not at all, madame. Christophe heard M. Vautrin, and 
went down and undid the door for him. And here are you 
imagining that ” 

“Give me my bodice, and be quick and get breakfast 
ready. Dish up the rest of the mutton with the potatoes, 
and you can put the stewed pears on the table, those at five a 
penny.” 

A few moments later Mme. Vauquer came down, just in 
time to see the cat knock down a plate that covered a bowl of 
milk, and begin to lap in all haste. 

“ Mistigris ! ” she cried. 

The cat fled, but promptly returned to rub against her 
ankles. 

“Oh! yes, you can wheedle, you old hypocrite!” she 
said. “ Sylvie ! Sylvie ! ” 

“Yes, madame; what is it?” 

“Just see what the cat has done ! ” 

“ It is all that stupid Christophe’s fault. I told him to 
stop and lay the table. What has become of him? Don’t 
you worry, madame ; Father Goriot shall have it. I will fill 
it up with water, and he won’t know the difference ; he never 
notices anything, not even what he eats.” 

“ I wonder where the old heathen can have gone?” said 
Mme. Vauquer, setting the plates round the table. 

“ Who knows ? He is up to all sorts of tricks.” 

“ I have overslept myself,” said Mme. Vauquer. 

“ But madame looks as fresh as a rose, all the same.” 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


43 


The door-bell rang at that moment, and Vautrin came 
through the sitting-room, singing loudly — 

“ ’ Txs the same old story everywhere , 

A roving heart and a roving glance ” 

“ Oh ! Mamma Vauquer ! good-morning ! ” he cried at the 
sight of his hostess, and he put his arm gaily round her waist. 

“ There ! have done ” 

“ ‘ Impertinence ! ’ Say it ! ” he answered. “ Come, say 
it ! Now isn’t that what you really mean ? Stop a bit, I will 
help you to set the table. Ah ! I am a nice man, am I not ? 

“ ‘ For the lock r of brown and the golden hair 
A sighing lover.' 

“ Oh ! I have just seen something so funny 

“ ‘ led by chancel ” 

11 What ? ” asked the widow. 

“ Father Goriot in the goldsmith’s shop in the Rue Dau- 
phine at half-past eight this morning. They buy old spoons 
and forks and gold lace there, and Goriot sold a piece of 
silver plate for a good round sum. It had been twisted out of 
shape very neatly for a man that’s not used to the trade.” 

“Really? You don’t say so ? ” 

“ Yes. One of my friends is expatriating himself ; I had 
been to see him off on board the Royal Mail steamer, and 
was coming back here. I waited after that to see what Father 
Goriot would do ; it is a comical affair. He came back to 
this quarter of the world, to the Rue des Gres, and went into 
a money-lender’s house ; everybody knows him, Gobseck, a 
stuck-up rascal, that would make dominoes out of his father’s 
bones ; a Turk, a heathen, an old Jew, a Greek ; it would be 
a difficult matter to rob him , for he puts all his coin into the 
bank.” 

“ Then what was Father Goriot doing there ? ” 


44 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


“ Doing ? ” said Vautrin. “ Nothing ; he was bent on his 
own undoing. He is a simpleton, stupid enough to ruin him- 
self by running after ” 

“ There he is ! ” said Sylvie. 

“ Christophe,” cried Father Goriot’s voice, “come upstairs 
with me.” 

Christophe went up, and shortly afterwards came down 
again. 

“Where are you going?” Mme. Vauquer asked of her 
servant. 

“ Out on an errand for M. Goriot.” 

“What may that be?” said Vautrin, pouncing on a letter 
in Christophe’s hand. “ la Comtessc Anaslasie dt Hes- 

taud he read. “ Where are you going with it ? ” he added, 
as he gave the letter back to Christophe. 

“To the Rue du Helder. I have orders to give this into 
her hands myself.” 

“ What is there inside it ? ” said Vautrin, holding the letter 
up to the light. “A bank-note? No.” He peered into 
the envelope. “A receipted account!” he cried. “My 
word! ’tis a gallant old dotard. Off with you, old chap,” 
he said, bringing down a hand on Christophe’s head, and 
spinning the man round like a thimble ; “ you will have a 
famous tip.” 

By this time the table was set. Sylvie was boiling the 
milk ; Mme. Vauquer was lighting a fire in the stove with 
some assistance from Vautrin, who kept on humming to him- 
self — 


“ The same old story everywhere, 

A roving heart and a roving glance .” 


When everything was ready, Mme. Couture and Mile. 
Taillefer came in. 

“Where have you been this morning, fair lady?” said 
Mme. Vauquer, turning to Mme. Couture, 


FATHER GORIOT. 


45 


“ We have just been to say our prayers at Saint-Etienne du 
Mont. To-day is the day when we must go to see M. Taillefer. 
Poor little thing ! She is trembling like a leaf,” Mme. Cou- 
ture went on, as she seated herself before the fire and held the 
steaming soles of her boots to the blaze. 

“Warm yourself, Victorine,” said Mme. Vauquer. 

“It is quite right and proper, mademoiselle, to pray to 
heaven to soften your father’s heart,” said Vautrin, as he drew 
a chair nearer to the orphan girl; “but that is not enough. 
What you want is a friend who will give the monster a piece 
of his mind ; a barbarian that has three millions (so they say), 
and will not give you a dowry ; and a pretty girl needs a 
dowry nowadays.” 

“Poor child! ” said Mme. Vauquer. “Never mind, my 
pet, your wretch of a father is going just the way to bring 
trouble upon himself.” 

Victorine’s eyes filled with tears at the words, and the 
widow checked herself at a sign from Mme. Couture. 

“ If we could only see him ! ” said the commissary-general’s 
widow; “if I could speak to him myself and give him his 
wife’s last letter ! I have never dared to run the risk of send- 
ing it by post; he knew my handwriting ” 

“‘Oh woman, persecuted and injured innocent!’” ex- 
claimed Vautrin, breaking in upon her. “ So that is how you 
are, is it? In a few days’ time I will look into your affairs, 
and it will be all right, you shall see.” 

“Oh ! sir,” said Victorine, with a tearful but eager glance 
at Vautrin, who showed no sign of being touched by it, “ if 
you know of any way of communicating with my father, please 
be sure and tell him that his affection and my mother’s honor 
are more to me than all the money in the world. If you can 
induce him to relent a little towards me, I will pray to God 
for you. You may be sure of my gratitude ” 

“ The same old story everywhere ,' 1 ' 1 sang Vautrin, with a sa- 
tirical intonation. At this juncture, Goriot, Mile. Michonneau, 


46 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


and Poiret came downstairs together ; possibly the scent of 
the gravy which Sylvie was making to serve with the mutton 
had announced breakfast. The seven people thus assembled 
bade each other good-morning, and took their places at the 
table; the clock struck ten, and the student’s footsteps were 
heard outside. 

“Ah! here you are, M. Eugene,” said Sylvie; “every 
one is breakfasting at home to-day. 

The student exchanged greetings with the lodgers, and sat 
down beside Goriot. 

“ I have just met with a queer adventure,” he said, as he 
helped himself abundantly to the mutton, and cut a slice 
of bread, which Madame Vauquer’s sharp and watchful eyes 
gauged as usual. 

“ An adventure ? ” queried Poiret. 

“ Well, and what is there to astonish you in that, old boy?” 
Vautrin asked of Poiret. “ M. Eugene is cut out for that 
kind of thing.” 

Mile. Taillefer stole a timid glance at the young student. 

“ Tell us about your adventure,” said Mme. Vauquer. 

“Yesterday evening I went to a ball given by a cousin of 
mine, the Vicomtesse de Beauseant. She has a magnificent 
house ; the rooms were hung with silk — in short, it was a 
splendid affair, and I was as happy as a king ” 

“ Fisher,” put in Vautrin, interrupting. 

“ What do you mean, sir? ” said Eugene sharply. 

“I said * fisher,’ because kingfishers see a good deal more 
fun than kings.” 

“ Quite true ; I would much rather be the little careless 
bird than a king,” said Poiret the ditto-ist, “because ” 

“In fact ” —the law student cut him short — “ I danced 
with one of the handsomest women in the room, a charming 
countess, the most exquisite creature I have ever seen. There 
was peach blossom in her hair, and she had the loveliest bou- 
quet of flowers — real flowers, that scented the air but 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


47 


there ! it is no use trying to describe a woman glowing 
with the dance. You ought to have seen her ! Well, and 
this morning I met this divine countess about nine o’clock, 
on foot in the Rue des Gres. Oh ! how my heart beat ! I 
began to think ” 

“That she was coming here,” said Vautrin, with a keen 
look at the student. “ I expect that she was going to call on 
old Gobseck, a money-lender. If ever you explore a Parisian 
woman’s heart, you will find the money-lender first, and the 
lover afterwards. Your countess is called Anastasie de Res- 
taud, and she lives in the Rue de Helder.” 

The student stared hard at VauTin. Father Goriot raised 
his head at the words, and gave the two speakers a glance so 
full of intelligence and uneasiness that the lodgers beheld him 
with astonishment. 

“ Then Christophe was too late, and she must have gone to 
him ! ” cried Goriot, with anguish in his voice. 

“It is just as I guessed,” said Vautrin, leaning over to 
whisper in Mme. Vauquer’s ear. 

Goriot went on with his breakfast, but seemed unconscious 
of what he was doing, He had never looked more stupid 
nor more taken up with his own thoughts than he did at that 
moment. 

“ Who the devil could have told you her name, M. Vau- 
trin ? ” asked Eugene. 

“Aha! there you are!” answered Vautrin. “Old Father 
Goriot there knew it quite well ! and why should not I know 
it too?” 

“M. Goriot?” the student cried. 

“ What is it ? ” said the old man. “ So she was very beau- 
tiful, was she, yesterday night?” 

“Who?” 

“Mme. de Restaud.” 

“Look at the old wretch,” said Mme. Vauquer, speaking 
to Vautrin ; “ how his eyes light up ! ” 


48 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


“ Then does he really keep her? ” said Mile. Michonneau, 
in a whisper to the student. 

“ Oh ! yes, she was tremendously pretty,” Eugene an- 
swered. Father Goriot watched him with eager eyes. “ If 
Mme. de Beauseant had not been there, my divine countess 
would have been the queen of the ball ; none of the younger 
men had eyes for any one else. I was the twelfth on her list, 
and she danced every quadrille. The other women were furi- 
ous. She must have enjoyed herself, if ever creature did ! 
It is a true saying that there is no more beautiful sight than a 
frigate in full sail, a galloping horse, or a woman dancing.” 

“ So the wheel turns,” said Vautrin ; “ yesterday night at 
a duchess’ ball, this morning in a money-lender’s office, on 
the lowest rung of the ladder — -just like a Parisienne ! If their 
husbands cannot afford to pay for their frantic extravagance, 
they will sell themselves. Or if they cannot do that, they 
will tear out their mothers’ hearts to find something to pay 
for their splendor. They will turn the world upside down. 
Just a Parisienne through and through ! ” 

Father Goriot’s face, which had shone at the student’s 
words like the sun on a bright day, clouded over all at once 
at this cruel speech of Vautrin’s. 

“ Well,” said Mme. Vauquer, “ but where is your adven- 
ture ? Did you speak to her ? Did you ask her if she wanted 
to study law ? ” 

“ She did not see me,” said Eugene. “ But only think of 
meeting one of the prettiest women in Paris in the Rue des 
Gres at nine o’clock ! She could not have reached home 
after the ball till two o’clock this morning. Wasn’t it queer? 
There is no place like Paris for these sort of adventures.” 

“ Pshaw ! much funnier things than that happen here ! ” 
exclaimed Vautrin. 

Mile. Tail lefer had scarcely heeded the talk, she was so 
absorbed by the thought of the new attempt that she was 
about to make. Mme. Couture made a sign that it was time 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


4 $ 


to go upstairs and dress ; the two ladies went out, and Father 
Goriot followed their example. 

“Well, did you see?” said Mme. Vauquer, addressing 
Vautrin and the rest of the circle, “ He is ruining himself 
for those women, that is plain.” 

“ Nothing will ever make me believe that that beautiful 
Comtesse de Restaud is anything to Father Goriot,” cried the 
student. 

“Well, and if you don’t,” broke in Vautrin, “we are not 
set on convincing you. You are too young to know Paris 
thoroughly yet ; later on you will find out that there are 

what we call men with a passion ” 

Mile. Michonneau gave Vautrin a quick glance at these 
words. They seemed to be like the sound of a trumpet to 
a trooper’s horse. “Aha!” said Vautrin, stopping in his 
speech to give her a searching glance, “ so we have had our 
little experiences, have we? ” 

The old maid lowered her eyes like a nun who sees a statue. 
“ Well,” he went on, “ when folk of that kind get a notion 
into their heads, they cannot drop it. They must drink the 
water from some particular spring — it is stagnant as often as 
not ; but they will sell their wives and families, they will sell 
their own souls to the devil to get it. For some this spring is 
play, or the stock exchange, or music, or a collection of pic- 
tures or insects ; for others it is some woman who can give 
them the dainties they like. You might offer these last all 
the women on earth — they would turn up their noses ; they 
will have the only one who can gratify their passion. It often 
happens that the woman does not care for them at all, and 
treats them cruelly ; they buy their morsels of satisfaction 
very dear ; but no matter, the fools are never tired of it ; they 
will take their last blanket to the pawnbroker to give their 
last five-franc piece to her. Father Goriot here is one of that 
sort. He is discreet, so the Countess exploits him — just the 
way of the gay world. The poor old fellow thinks of her and 
4 


50 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


of nothing else. In all other respects you see he is a stupid 
animal j but get him on that subject, and his eyes sparkle like 
diamonds. That secret is not difficult to guess. He took 
some plate himself this morning to the melting-pot, and I saw 
him at Daddy Gobseck’s in the Rue des Gres. And now, 
mark what follows — he came back here, and gave a letter for 
the Comtesse de Restaud to that noodle of a Christophe, who 
showed us the address ; there was a receipted bill inside it. 
It is clear that it was an urgent matter if the Countess also 
went herself to the old money-lender. Father Goriot has 
financed her handsomely. There is no need to tack a tale 
together ; the thing is self-evident. So that shows you, sir 
student, that all the time your countess was smiling, dancing, 
flirting, swaying her peach-flower crowned head, with her 
gown gathered into her hand, her slippers were pinching her, 
as they say ; she was thinking of her protested bills, or her 
lover’s protested bills.” 

“You have made me wild to know the truth,” cried 
Eugene de Rastignac ; “ I will go to call on Mme. de Restaud 
to-morrow.” 

“Yes,” echoed Poiret ; “you must go and call on Mme. 
de Restaud.” 

“ And perhaps you will find Father Goriot there, who will 
take payment for the assistance he politely rendered.” 

Eugene looked disgusted. “ Why, then, this Paris of yours 
is a slough.” 

“ And an uncommonly queer slough, too,” replied Vautrin. 
“ The mud splashes you as you drive through it in your 
carriage — you are a respectable person ; you go afoot and 
are splashed — you are a scoundrel. You are so unlucky as 
to walk off with something or other belonging to somebody 
else, and they exhibit you as a curiosity in the Place du 
Palais-de-Justice ; you steal a million, and you are pointed 
out in every salon as a model of virtue. / And you pay thirty 
millions for the police and the courts of justice, for the 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


51 


maintenance of law and order! A pretty state of things 
it is! ” 

“ W hat , ' 5 cried Mme. Vauquer, “ has Father Goriot really 
melted down his silver posset-uish? ” 

“ There were two turtle-doves on the lid, were there 
not? ” asked Eugene. 

“ Yes, that there were.” 

“ Then, was he fond of it ! ” said Eugene. “ He cried 
while he was breaking up the cup and plate. I happened 
to see him by accident.” 

“ It was dear to him as his own life,” answered the widow. 

“There! you see how infatuated the old fellow is,” cried 
Vautrin. “ The woman yonder can coax the soul out of him.” 

The student went up to his room. Vautrin went out, and 
a few minutes later Mme. Couture and Victorine drove away 
in a cab which Sylvie had called for them. Poiret gave 
his arm to Mile. Michonneau, and they went together to 
spend the two sunniest hours of the day in the Jardin des 
Plantes. 

“ Well, those two are as good as married,” was the portly 
Sylvie’s comment. “ They are going out together to-day 
for the first time. They are such a couple of dry sticks 
that if they happen to strike against each other they will 
draw sparks like flint and steel.” 

“Keep clear of Mile. Michonneau’s shawl, then,” said 
Mme. Vauquer, laughing ; “it would flare up like tinder.” 

At four o’clock that evening, when Goriot came in, he 
saw, by the light of two smoky lamps, that Victorine’s eyes 
were red. Mme. Vauquer was listening to the history of 
the visit made that morning to M. Taillefer; it had been made 
in vain. Taillefer was tired of the annual application made 
by his daughter and her elderly friend ; he gave them a per- 
sonal interview in order to arrive at an understanding with 
them. 


52 


FATHER GORIOT. 


“My dear lady,” said Mme. Couture, addressing Mme. 
Vauquer, “just imagine it; he did not even ask Victorine to 
sit down, she was standing the whole time. He said to me 
quite coolly, without putting himself in a passion, that we 
might spare ourselves the trouble of going there; that the 
young lady (he would not call her his daughter) was injuring 
her cause by importuning him (importuning ! once a year, the 
wretch!); that as Victorine’s mother had nothing when he 
married her, Victorine ought not to expect anything from 
him ; in fact, he said the most cruel things, that made the 
poor child burst out crying. The little thing threw herself 
at her father’s feet and spoke up bravely ; she said that she 
only persevered in her visits for her mother’s sake ; that she 
would obey him without a murmur, but that she begged him 
to read her poor dead mother’s farewell letter. She took it 
up and gave it to him, saying the most beautiful things in the 
world, most beautifully expressed ; I do not know where she 
learned them ; God must have put them into her head, for 
the poor child was inspired to speak so nicely that it made 
me cry like a fool to hear her talk. And what do you think 
the monster was doing all the .time ? Cutting his nails! He 
took the letter that poor Mme. Taillefer had soaked with tears, 
and flung it on to the chimney-piece. ‘ That is all right,’ he 
said. He held out his hands to raise his daughter, but she 
covered them with kisses, and he drew them away again. Scan- 
dalous, isn’t it? And his great booby of a son came in and 
took no notice of his sister.” 

“Very singular conduct, indeed!” exclaimed Mme. Vauquer. 

“What inhuman wretches they must be !” said Father 
Goriot. 

“ And then they both went out of the room,” Mme. Couture 
went on, without heeding the worthy vermicelli-maker’s ex- 
clamation ; “ father and son bowed to me, and asked me to 
excuse them on account of urgent business ! That is the 
history of our call. Well, he has seen his daughter at any rate. 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


53 


How he can refuse to acknowledge her I cannot think, for 

they are as like as two peas.” 

The boarders dropped in one after another, interchanging 
greetings and the empty jokes that certain classes of Parisians 
regard as humorous and witty. Dulness is their prevailing 
ingredient, and the whole point consists in mispronouncing a 
word or in a gesture This kind of argot is always changing. 
The essence of the jest consists in some catchword suggested by 
a political event, an incident in the police courts, a street song, 
or a bit of burlesque at some theatre, and forgotten in a month. 
Anything and everything serves to keep up a game of battle- 
dore and shuttlecock with words and ideas. The diorama, a 
recent invention, which carried an optical illusion, a degree 
farther than panoramas, had given rise to a mania among art 
students for ending every word with rama. The Maison 
Vauquer had caught the infection from a young artist among 
the boarders. 

“ Well, Monsieur-r-r Poiret,” said the employe from the 
Museum, “ how is your health-orama ? ” Then, without wait- 
ing for an answer, he turned to Mme. Couture and Victorine 
with a “ Ladies, you seem melancholy.” 

“Is dinner ready?” cried Horace Bianchon, a medical 
student, and a friend of Rastignac’s ; “ my stomach is sinking 
usque ad ta lanes. ’ * 

“ There is an uncommon f?-ozerama outside ! ” said Vautrin. 
“ Make room there, Father Goriot ! Confound it ! your foot 
covers the whole front of the stove. Let somebody else have 
a show.” 

“Illustrious M. Vautrin,” put in Bianchon, “why do you 
say frozerama ? It is incorrect ; it should be frozenrama." 

“ No, it shouldn’t,” said the official from the Museum ; 
“ frozerama is right by the same rule that you say * My feet 
are froze. ’ ” 

“Ah! ah! ” 

“ Here is his excellency the Marquis de Rastignac, Doctor 


54 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


of the Law of Contraries/’ cried Bianchon, seizing Eugene 
by the throat, and almost throttling him. 

“ Hallo there ! hallo ! ” 

Mile. Michonneau came noiselessly in, bowed to the rest of 
the party, and took her place beside the three women without 
saying a word. 

“That old bat always makes me shudder,” said Bianchon 
in a low voice, indicating Mile. Michonneau to Vautrin. “ I 
have studied Gall’s system, and I am sure she has the bump 
of Judas.” 

“ Then you have seen a case before? ” said Vautrin. 

“Who has not? ” answered Bianchon. “ Upon my word, 
that ghastly old maid looks just like one of the long worms 
that will gnaw a beam through, give them time enough.” 

“That is the way, young man,” returned he of the forty 
years and the dyed whiskers — 

“ The rose has lived the life of a rose— 

A morning's space.” 

“Aha ! here is a magnificent soupe-au-rama ,” cried Poiret 
as Christophe came in bearing the soup with cautious heed. 

“I beg your pardon, sir,” said Mme. Vauquer; “it is 
soupe aux choux .” 

All the young men roared with laughter. 

“ Had you there, Poiret ! ” 

“ Poir-r-r-rette ! she had you there ! ” 

“ Score two points to Mamma Vauquer,” said Vautrin. 

“Did anyone notice the fog this morning?” asked the 
official. 

“ It was a frantic fog,” said Bianchon, “ a fog unparalleled, 
doleful, melancholy, sea-green, asthmatical — a Goriot of a 

f 0 cr t ” 

“A Goriorama,” said the art student, “because you 
couldn’t see a thing in it.” 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


55 


u Hey ! Milord Gaoriotte, they air talking about yoo-o- 

ou.” 

Father Goriot, seated at the lower end of the table, close 
to the door through which the servant entered, raised his 
face ; he had smelt at a scrap of bread that lay under his 
table napkin, an old trick acquired in his commercial capa- 
city, that still showed itself at times. 

“Well,” Mme. Vauquer cried in sharp tones, that rang 
above the rattle of spoons and plates and the sound of other 
voices, “and is there anything the matter with the bread?” 

“ Nothing whatever, madame,” he answered ; “ on the 
contrary, it is made of the best quality of corn ; flour from 
Etampes.” 

“ How could you tell? ” asked Eugene. 

“ By the color, by the flavor.” 

“ You knew the flavor by the smell, I suppose,” said Mme. 
Vauquer. “You have grown so economical, you will find 
out how to live on the smell of cooking at last.” 

“Take out a patent for it then,” cried the Museum official; 
“ you would make a handsome fortune.” 

“ Never mind him,” said the artist ; “ he does that sort of 
thing to delude us into thinking that he was a vermicelli- 
maker.” 

“Your nose is a corn-sampler, it appears?” inquired the 
official. 

“ Corn what ?” asked Bianchon. 

“Corn-el.” 

“ Corn-et.” 

“ Corn-elian.” 

“ Corn-ice.” 

“ Corn-ucopia.” 

“Corn-crake.” 

“ Corn-cockle.” 

“ Corn-orama.” 

The eight responses came like a rolling fire from every part 

C 


56 


FATHER GORIOT. 


of the room, and the laughter that followed was the more 
uproarious because poor Father Goriot stared at the other with 
a puzzled look, like a foreigner trying to catch the meaning 
of words in a language that he does not understand. 

“Corn? ” he said, turning to Vautrin, his next 

neighbor. 

“Corn on your foot, old man ! ” said Vautrin, and he 
drove Father Goriot’s cap down over his eyes by a blow on 
the crown. 

The poor old man thus suddenly attacked was for a moment 
too bewildered to do anything. Christophe carried off his 
plate, thinking that he had finished his soup, so that when 
Goriot had pushed back his cap from his eyes his spoon 
encountered the table. Every one burst out laughing. “You 
are a disagreeable joker, sir,” said the old man, “and if you 
take any further liberties with me ” 

“ Well, what then, old boy?” Vautrin interrupted. 

“ Well, then, you shall pay dearly for it some day ” 

“Down below, eh?” said the artist, “in the little dark 
corner where they put naughty boys.” 

“Well, mademoiselle,” Vautrin said, turning to Victorine, 
“ you are eating nothing. So papa was refractory, was he? ” 

“ A monster ! ” said Mine. Couture. 

“ Mademoiselle might make application for aliment pending 
her suit ; she is not eating anything. Eh ! eh ! just see how 
Father Goriot is staring at Mile. Victorine.” 

The old man had forgotten his dinner, he was so absorbed 
in gazing at the poor girl ; the sorrow in her face was unmis- 
takable — the slighted love of a child whose father would not 
recognize her. 

“We are mistaken about Father Goriot, my dear boy,” 
said Eugene in a low voice. “ He is not an idiot, nor want- 
ing in energy. Try your Gall system on him, and let me 
know what you think. I saw him crush a silver dish last 
night as if it had been made of wax ; there seems to be some- 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


57 


thing extraordinary going on in his mind just now, to judge 
by his face. His life is so mysterious that it must be worth 
studying. Oh, you may laugh, Bianchon ; I am not joking.” 

“ The man is a subject, is he ? ” said Bianchon ; “all right ! 
I will dissect him if he will give me a chance.” 

“ No ; feel his bumps.” 

“ Hm ! — his stupidity might perhaps be contagious.” 

The next day Rastignac dressed himself very elegantly, and 
about three o’clock in the afternoon went to call on Mme. de 
Restaud. On the way thither he indulged in the wild intox- 
icating dreams which fill a young head so full of delicious 
excitement. Young men at his age take no account of obsta- 
cles nor of dangers ; they see success in every direction ; imag- 
ination has free play, and turns their lives into a romance ; 
they are saddened or discouraged by the. collapse of one of the 
wild visionary schemes that have no existence save in their 
heated fancy. If youth were not ignorant and timid, civiliza- 
tion would be impossible. 

Eugene took unheard-of pains to keep himself in a spotless 
condition, but on his way through the streets he began to 
think about Mme. de Restaud and what he should say to her. 
He equipped himself with wit, rehearsed repartees in the course 
of an imaginary conversation, and prepared certain neat 
speeches a la Talleyrand, conjuring up a series of small events 
which should prepare the way for the declaration on which he 
had based his future ; and during these musings the law student 
was bespattered with mud, and by the time he reached the 
Palais Royal he was obliged to have his boots blacked and his 
trousers brushed. 

“If I were rich,” he said, as he changed the five-franc 
piece he had brought with him in case anything might happen, 
“I would take a cab, then I could think at my ease.” 

At last he reached the Rue de Helder, and asked for the 
Comtesse de Restaud. Pie bore the contemptuous glances of 


58 


FATHER GORIOT. 


the servants, who had seen him cross the court on foot, with 
the cold fury of a man who knows that he will succeed some 
day. He understood the meaning of their glances at once, 
for he had felt his inferiority as soon as he entered the court, 
where a smart cab was waiting. All the delights of life in 
Paris seemed to be implied by this visible and manifest sign 
of luxury and extravagance. A fine horse, in magnificent 
harness, was pawing the ground, and all at once the law 
student felt out of humor with himself. Every compartment 
in his brain which he had thought to find so full of wit was 
bolted fast; he grew positively stupid. He sent up his name 
to the Countess, and waited in the ante-chamber, standing on 
one foot before a window that looked out upon the court ; 
mechanically he leaned his elbow against the sash, and stared 
before him. The time seemed long ; he would have left the 
house but for the southern tenacity of purpose which works 
miracles when it is single-minded. 

“ Madame is in her boudoir, and cannot see anyone at 
present, sir,” said the servant. “She gave me no answer; 
but if you will go into the dining-room, there is some one 
already there.” 

Rastignac was impressed with a sense of the formidable 
power of the lackey who can accuse or condemn his masters 
by a word ; he coolly opened the door by which the man had 
just entered the ante-chamber, meaning, no doubt, to show 
these insolent flunkeys that he was familiar with the house ; 
but he found that he had thoughtlessly precipitated himself 
into a small room full of dressers, where lamps were standing, 
and hot-water pipes, on which towels were being dried ; a 
dark passage and a back staircase lay beyond it. Stifled 
laughter from the ante-chamber added to his confusion. 

“Phis way to the drawing-room, sir,” said the servant, 
with the exaggerated respect which seemed to be one more 
jest at his expense. 

Eugene turned so quickly that he stumbled against a bath. 








The horse took fright at the umbrella. 





FATHER GO RIOT. 


59 


By good luck, he managed to keep his hat on his head, and 
saved it from immersion in the water ; but just as he turned, 
a door opened at the farther end of the dark passage, dimly 
lighted by a small lamp. Rastignac heard voices and the 
sound of a kiss ; one of the speakers was Mme. de Restaud, 
the other was Father Goriot. Eugene followed the servant 
through the dining-room into the drawing-room ; he went to a 
window that looked out into the courtyard, and stood there 
for a while. He meant to know whether this Goriot was 
really the Goriot that he knew. His heart beat unwontedly 
fast ; he remembered Vautrin’s hideous insinuations. A well- 
dressed young man suddenly emerged from the room almost 
as Eugene entered it, saying impatiently to the servant who 
stood at the door: “I am going, Maurice. Tell Madame la 
Comtesse that I waited more than half an hour for her.” 

Whereupon this insolent being, who, doubtless, had a right 
to be insolent, sang an Italian trill, and went towards the 
window where Eugene was standing, moved thereto quite as 
much by a desire to see the student’s face as by a wish to look 
out into the courtyard. 

“But M. le Comte had better wait a moment longer; 
madame is disengaged,” said Maurice, as he returned to the 
ante-chamber. 

Just at that moment Father Goriot appeared close to the 
gate ; he had emerged from a door at the foot of the back 
staircase. The worthy soul was preparing to open his um- 
brella regardless of the fact that the great gate had opened to 
admit a tilbury, in which a young man with a ribbon at his 
button-hole was seated. Father Goriot had scarcely time to 
start back and save himself. The horse took fright at the um- 
brella, swerved, and dashed forward towards the flight of steps. 
The young man looked round in annoyance, saw Father Goriot, 
and greeted him as he went out with constrained courtesy, such 
as people usually show to a money-lender so long as they require 
his services, or the sort of respect they feel it necessary to 


60 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


show for some one whose reputation has been blown upon, so 
that they blush to acknowledge his acquaintance. Father 
Goriot gave him a little friendly nod and a good-natured 
smile. All this happened with lightning speed. Eugene was 
so deeply interested that he forgot that he was not alone till 
he suddenly heard the Countess’ voice. 

“ Oh ! Maxime, were you going away?” she said reproach- 
fully, with a shade of pique in her manner. The Countess 
had not seen the incident nor the entrance of the tilbury. 
Rastignac turned abruptly and saw her standing before him, 
coquettishly dressed in a loose white cashmere gown with knots 
of rose-colored ribbon here and there; her hair was carelessly 
coiled about her head, as is the wont of Parisian women in 
the morning; there was a soft fragrance about her — doubtless 
she was fresh from a bath — her graceful form seemed more 
flexible, her beauty more luxuriant. Her eyes glistened. A 
young man can see everything at a glance ; he feels the radi- 
ant influence of woman as a plant discerns and absorbs its 
nutriment from the air ; he did not need to touch her hands 
to feel their cool freshness. He saw faint rose tints through 
the cashmere of the dressing-gown ; it had fallen slightly 
open, giving glimpses of a bare throat, on which the student’s 
eyes rested. The Countess had no need of the adventitious 
aid of corsets ; her girdle defined the outlines of her slender 
waist ; her throat was a challenge to love ; her feet, thrust into 
slippers, were daintily small. As Maxime took her hand and 
kissed it, Eugene became aware of Maxime’s existence, and 
the Countess saw Eugene. 

“Oh! is that you M. de Rastignac? I am very glad to 
see you,” she said, but there was something in her manner 
that a shrewd observer would have taken as a hint to depart. 

Maxime, as the Countess Anastasie had called the young 
man with the haughty insolence of bearing, looked from 
Eugene to the lady, and from the lady to Eugene ; it was 
sufficiently evident that he wished to be rid of the latter. 


FATHER GORIOT. 


61 


An exact and faithful rendering of the glance might be given 
in the words: “ Look here, my dear; I hope you intend to 
send this little whipper-snapper about his business.” 

The Countess consulted the young man’s face with an intent 
submissiveness that betiays all the secrets of a woman’s heart, 
and Rastignac all at once began to hate him violently. To 
begin with, the sight ot the tair carefully arranged curls on 
the other s comely head had convinced him that his own crop 
was hideous ; Maxime’s boots, moreover, were elegant and 
spotless, while his own, in spite of all his care, bore some 
traces of his recent walk ; and, finally, Maxime’s overcoat 
fitted the outline of his figure gracefully, he looked like a 
pretty woman, while Eugene was wearing a black coat at half- 
past two. The quick-witted child of the Charente felt the 
disadvantage at which he was placed beside this tall, slender 
dandy, with the clear gaze and the pale face, one of those 
men who would ruin orphan children without scruple. 
Mme. de Restaud fled into the next room without waiting for 
Eugene to speak ; shaking out the skirts of her dressing-gown 
in her flight, so that she looked like a white butterfly, and 
Maxi me hurried after her. Eugene, in a fury, followed Max- 
ime and the Countess, and the three stood once more face to 
face by the hearth in the large drawing-room. The law student 
felt quite sure that the odious Maxime found him in the way, 
and even at the risk of displeasing Mme. de Restaud, he 
meant to annoy the dandv. It had struck him all at once 
that he had seen the young man before at Mme. de Beauseant’s 
ball ; he guessed the relation between Maxime and Mme. de 
Restaud ; and with the youthful audacity that commits pro- 
digious blunders or achieves signal success, he said to himself, 
“ This is my rival ; I mean to cut him out.” 

Rash resolve ! He did not know that M. le Comte Maxime 
de Trailles would wait till he was insulted, so as to fire first and 
kill his man. Eugene was a sportsman and a good shot, but 
he had not yet hit the bull’s eye twenty times out of twenty- 


62 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


two. The young Count dropped into a low chair by the 
hearth, took up the tongs, and made up the fire so violently 
and so sulkily, that Anastasie’s fair face suddenly clouded 
over. She turned to Eugene with a cool, questioning glance 
that asked plainly, “ Why do you not go?” a glance which 
well-bred people regard as a cue to make their exit. 

Eugene assumed an amiable expression. 

“ Madame,” he began, “ I hastened to call upon you ” 

He stopped short. The door opened, and the owner of the 
tilbury suddenly appeared. He had left his hat outside, and 
did not greet the Countess ; he looked meditatively at Ras- 
tismac, and held out his hand to Maxime with a cordial 
“Good-morning,” that astonished Eugene not a little. The 
young provincial did not understand the amenities of a triple 
alliance. 

“ M. de Restaud,” said the Countess, introducing her 
husband to the law student. 

Eugene bowed profoundly. 

“ This gentleman,” she continued, presenting Eugene to 
her husband, “ is M. de Rastignac ; he is related to Mme. la 
Vicomtesse de Beauseant through the Marcillacs ; I had the 
pleasure of meeting him at her last ball.” 

Related to Mme. la Vicomtesse de Beauseant through the 
Marcillacs / These words, on which the Countess threw ever 
so slight an emphasis, by reason of the pride that the mistress 
of the house takes in showing that she only receives people 
of distinction as visitors in her house, produced a magical 
effect. The Count’s stiff manner relaxed at once as he re- 
turned the student’s bow. 

“Delighted to have an opportunity of making your ac- 
quaintance,” he said. 

Maxime de Trailles himself gave Eugene an uneasy glance, 
and suddenly dropped his insolent manner. The mighty 
name had all the power of a fairy’s wand ; those closed com- 
partments in the southern brain flew open again ; Rastignac’s 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


63 


carefully drilled faculties returned. It was as if a sudden 
light had pierced the obscurity of this upper world of Paris, 
and he began to see, though everything was indistinct as 
yet. Mine. Vauquer’s lodging-house and Father Goriot were 
very far remote from his thoughts. 

“ I thought that the Marcillacs were extinct,” the Comte 
de Restaud said, addressing Eugene. 

“Yes, they are extinct,” answered the law student. “ My 
great uncle, the Chevalier de Rastignac, married the heiress 
of the Marcillac family. They had only one daughter, who 
married the Marechal de Clarimbault, Mme. de Beauseant’s 
grandfather on the mother’s side. We are the younger 
branch of the family, and the younger branch is all the 
poorer because my great-uncle, the vice-admiral, lost all that 
he had in the King’s service. The government during the 
Revolution refused to admit our claims when the Compagnie 
des Indes was liquidated.” 

“Was not your great-uncle in command of the Vengeur 
before 1789 ? ” 

“Yes.” 

“ Then he would be acquainted with my grandfather, who 
commanded the Warwick .” 

Maxime looked at Mme. de Restaud and shrugged his 
shoulders, as much as to say, “If he is going to discuss 
nautical matters with that fellow, it is all over with us.” 
Anastasie understood the glance that M. de Trailles gave her. 
With a woman’s admirable tact and shrdewness, she began to 
smile and said : 

“ Come with me, Maxime ; I have something to say to you. 
We will leave you two gentlemen to sail in company on board 
the Warwick and the Vengeur .” 

She rose to her feet and signed to Maxime to follow her, 
mirth and mischief in her whole attitude, and the two went 
in the direction of the boudoir. The morganatic couple (to 
use a convenient German expression which has no exact 


64 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


equivalent) had reached the door, when the Count inter- 
rupted himself in his talk with Eugene. 

“ Anastasie ! ” he cried pettishly, “just stay a moment, 
dear; you know very well that 

“ I am coming back in a minute,” she interrupted; “1 
have a commission for Maxime to execute, and I want to 
tell him about it.” 

She came back almost immediately. She had noticed 
the inflection in her husband’s voice, and knew that it would 
not be safe to retire to the boudoir : like all women who are 
compelled to study their husband’s characters in order to 
have their own way, and whose business it is to know exactly 
how far they can go without endangering a good understand- 
ing, she was very careful to avoid petty collisions in domestic 
life. It was Eugene who had brought about this untoward 
incident ; so the Countess looked at Maxime and indicated 
the law student with an air of exasperation. M. de Trailles 
addressed the Count, the Countess, and Eugene with the 
pointed remark, “You are busy, I do not want to interrupt 
you; good-day,” and he went. 

“Just wait a moment, Maxime! ” the Count called after 
him. 

“Come and dine with us,” said the Countess, leaving Eu- 
gene and her husband together once more. She followed 
Maxime into the little drawing-room, where they sat together 
sufficiently long to feel sure that Rastignac had taken his 
leave. 

The law student heard their laughter, and their voices, and 
the pauses in their talk ; he grew malicious, exerted his con- 
versational powers for M. de Restaud, flattered him, and 
drew him into discussions, to the end that he might see the 
Countess again and discover the nature of her relations with 
Father Goriot. This countess, with a husband and a lover, 
for Maxime clearly was her lover, was a mystery. What was 
the secret tie that bound her to the old tradesman ? This 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


65 


mystery he meant to penetrate, hoping by its means to gain a 
sovereign ascendancy over this fair typical Parisian. 

“ Anastasie ! ” the Count called again to his wife. 

“ Poor Maxime ! ” she said, addressing the young man. 
“ Come, we must resign ourselves. This evening ” 

“I hope, Nasie,” he said in her ear, * 4 that you will give 
orders not to admit that youngster, whose eyes light up like 
live coals when he looks at you. He will make you a declara- 
tion, and compromise you, and then you will compel me to 
kill him.” 

“ Are you mad, Maxime? ” she said. “ A young lad of a 
student is, on the contrary, a capital lightning-conductor; 
is not that so? Of course, I mean to make Restaud furiously 
jealous of him.” 

Maxime burst out laughing, and went out, followed by 
the Countess, who stood at the window to watch him into his 
carriage ; he shook his whip, and made his horse prance. 
She only returned when the great gate had been closed after 
him. 

“ What do you think, dear?” cried the Count, her hus- 
band, “ this gentleman’s family estate is not far from Verteuil, 
on the Charente; his great-uncle and my grandfather were 
acquainted.” 

“Delighted to find that we have acquaintances in com- 
mon,” said the Countess, with a preoccupied manner. 

“ More than you think,” said Eugene, in a low voice. 

“ What do you mean ? ” she asked quickly. 

“ Why, only just now,” said the student, “ I saw a gentle- 
man go out at the gate, Father Goriot, my next-door neigh- 
bor in the house where I am lodging.” 

At the sound of this name, and the prefix that embellished 
it, the Count, who was stirring the fire, let the tongs fall as 
though they had burned his fingers, and rose to his feet. 

“Sir,” he cried, “you might have called him ‘Monsieur 

Goriot ! ’ ” 

5 


66 


FATHER G OR 10 T. 


The Countess turned pale at first at the sight of her hus- 
band’s vexation, then she reddened ; clearly she was embar- 
rassed, her answer was made in a tone that she tried to make 
natural, and with an air of assumed carelessness — 

“ You could not know any one who is dearer to us 
both ” 

She broke off, glanced at the piano as if some fancy had 
crossed her mind, and asked, “Are you fond of music, M. 
de Rastignac ? ” 

“ Exceedingly,” answered Eugene, flushing, and discon- 
certed by a dim suspicion that he had somehow been guilty 
of a clumsy piece of folly. 

“Do you sing?” she cried, going to the piano, and, sit- 
ting down before it, she swept her fingers over the keyboard 
from end to end. R-r-r-r-ah ! 

“No, madame.” 

The Comte de Restaud walked to and fro. 

“ That is a pity ; you are without one great means of suc- 
cess. Ca~ro t ca-a-roy ca-a-a-ro , non du-bi-ta-re ,” sang the 
Countess. 

Eugene had a second time waved a magic wand when he 
uttered Goriot’s name, but the effect seemed to be entirely 
opposite to that produced by the -formula “ related to Mine, 
de Beauseant.” His position was not unlike that of some 
visitor permitted as a favor to inspect a private collection of 
curiosities, when by inadvertence he comes into collision with 
a glass case full of sculptured figures, and three or four heads, 
imperfectly secured, fall at the shock. He wished the earth 
would open and swallow him. Mme. de Restaud’s expression 
was reserved and chilly, her eyes had grown indifferent, and 
sedulously avoided meeting those of the unlucky student of 
law. 

“Madame,” he said, “you wish to talk with M. de Res- 
taud ; permit me to wish you good-day ” 

The Countess interrupted him by a gesture, saying hastily, 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


67 


“ Whenever you come to see us, both M. de Restaud and I 
shall be delighted to see you.” 

Eugene made a profound bow and took his leave, followed 
by M. de Restaud, who insisted, in spite of his remonstrances, 
on accompanying him into the hall. 

“ Neither your mistress nor I are at home to that gentle- 
man when he calls,” the Count said to Maurice, his servant, 
when the door had closed after Eugene. 

As Eugene set foot on the steps, he saw that it was raining. 

“ Come,” said he to himself, “ somewhow I have just made 
a mess of it, I do not know how. And now I am going to 
spoil my hat and coat into the bargain. I ought to stop in 
my corner, grind away at law, and never look to be anything 
but a boorish country magistrate. How can I go into society, 
when to manage properly you want a lot of cabs, varnished 
boots, gold watch-chains, and all sorts of things ; you have 
to wear white doeskin gloves that cost six francs in the morn- 
ing, and primrose kid gloves every evening? A fig for that 
old humbug of a Goriot ! " 

When he reached the street-door, the driver of a hackney 
coach, who had probably just deposited a wedding party at 
their door, and asked nothing better than a chance of making 
a little money for himself without his employer’s knowledge, 
saw that Eugene had no umbrella, remarked his black coat, 
white waistcoat, yellow gloves, and varnished boots, and 
stopped and looked at him inquiringly. Eugene, in the blind 
desperation that drives a young man to plunge deeper and 
deeper into an abyss, as if he might hope to find a fortunate 
issue in its lowest depths, nodded in reply to the driver’s 
signal, and stepped into the cab; a few stray petals of orange 
blossom and scraps of wire bore witness to its recent occupa- 
tion by a wedding party. 

“ Where am I to drive, sir? ” demanded the man, who, by 
this time, had taken off his white gloves. 

“Confound it! ” Eugene said to himself, “I am in for 


68 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


it now, and at least I will not spend cab-hire for nothing ! 
Drive to the Hotel Beauseant,” he said aloud. 

“ Which ? ” asked the man, a portentous word that reduced 
Eugene to confusion. This young man of fashion, species 
incerta , did not know that there were two Hotels Beauseant ; 
he was not aware how rich he was in relations who did not 
care about him. 

“The Vicomte de Beauseant, Rue ” 

“De Grenelle,” interrupted the driver, with a jerk of his 
head. “You see, there are the hotels of the Marquis and 
Comte de Beauseant in the Rue Saint-Dominique,” he added, 
drawing up the step. 

“ I know all about that,” said Eugene, severely. “ Every- 
body is laughing at me to-day, it seems ! ” he said to himself, 
as he deposited his hat on the opposite seat. “ This escapade 
will cost me a king’s ransom, but, at any rate, I shall call 
on my so-called cousin in a thoroughly aristocratic fashion. 
Goriot has cost me ten francs already, the old scoundrel ! 
My word ! I will tell Mine, de Beauseant about my adventure ; 
perhaps it may amuse her. Doubtless she will know the secret 
of the criminal relation between that handsome woman and 
the old rat without a tail. It would be better to find favor in 
my cousin’s eyes than to come in contact with that shameless 
woman, who seems to me to have very expensive tastes. Surely 
the beautiful Vicomtesse’s personal interest would turn the 
scale for me, when the mere mention of her name produces 
such an effect. Let us look higher. If you set yourself to 
carry the heights of heaven, you must face God.” 

The innumerable thoughts that surged through his brain 
might be summed up in these phrases. He grew calmer, and 
recovered something of his assurance as he watched the falling 
rain. He told himself that though he was about to squander 
two of the precious five-franc pieces that remained to him, the 
money was well laid out in preserving his coat, boots, and hat ; 
and his cabman’s cry of “Gate, if you please,” almost put 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


69 


him in spirits. A Swiss, in scarlet and gold, appeared, the 
great door groaned on its hinges, and Rastignac, with sweet 
satisfaction, beheld his equipage pass under the archway and 
stop before the flight of steps beneath the awning. The driver, 
in a blue-and-red greatcoat, dismounted and let down the step. 
As Eugene stepped out of the cab, he heard smothered laughter 
from the peristyle. Three or four lackeys were making merry 
over the festal appearance of the vehicle. In another moment 
the law student was enlightened as to the cause of their hilar- 
ity ; he felt the full force of the contrast between his equipage 
and one of the smartest broughams in Paris ; a coachman, with 
powdered hair, seemed to find it difficult to hold a pair of 
spirited horses, who stood chafing the bit. In Mtne. de Res- 
taud’s courtyard, in the Chaussee d’Antin, he had seen the 
neat turnout of a young man of six-and-twenty ; in the Fau- 
bourg Saint-Germain he found the luxurious equipage of a man 
of rank ; thirty thousand francs would not have purchased it. 

“ Who can be here?” said Eugene to himself. He began 
to understand, though somewhat tardily, that he must not 
expect to find many women in Paris who were not already 
appropriated, and that the capture of one of these queens 
would be likelv to cost something more than bloodshed. 
“Confound it all ! I expect my cousin also has her Maxime.” 

He went up the steps, feeling that he was a blighted being. 
The glass door was opened for him ; the servants were as 
solemn as jackasses under the currycomb. So far, Eugene 
had only been in the ballroom on the ground floor of the 
Hotel Beauseant ; the fete had followed so closely on the in- 
vitation that he had not had time to call on his cousin, and 
had therefore never seen Mme. de Beauseant’s apartments ; 
he was about to behold for the first time a great lady among 
* the wonderful and elegant surroundings that reveal her char- 
acter and reflect her daily life. He was the more curious, 
because Mme. de Restaud’s drawing-room had provided him 
with a standard of comparison. 


70 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


At half-past four the Vicomtesse de Beauseant was visible. 
Five minutes earlier she would not have received her cousin, 
but Eugene knew nothing of the recognized routine of various 
houses in Paris. He was conducted up the wide, white- 
painted, crimson-carpeted staircase, between the gilded balus- 
ters and masses of flowering plants, to Mme. de Beaus£ant’s 
apartments. He did not know the rumor current about Mme. 
de Beauseant, one of the biographies told, with variations, in 
whispers, every evening in the salons of Paris. 

For three years past her name had been spoken of in con- 
nection with that of one of the most wealthy and distinguished 
Portuguese nobles, the Marquis d’Ajuda-Pinto. It was one 
of those innocent liaisons which possess so much charm for 
the two thus attached to each other that they find the presence 
of a third person intolerable. The Vicomte de Beauseant, 
therefore, had himself set an example to the rest of the world 
by respecting, with as good a grace as might be, this morgan- 
atic union. Any one who came to call on the Vicomtesse in 
the early days of this friendship was sure to find the Marquis 
d’Ajuda-Pinto there. As, under the circumstances, Mme. de 
Beauseant could not very well shut her door against these 
visitors, she gave them such a cold reception, and showed so 
much interest in the study of the ceiling, that no one could 
fail to understand how much he bored her ; and when it 
became known in Paris that Mme. de Beauseant was bored 
by callers between two and four o’clock, she was left in per- 
fect solitude during that interval. She went to the Bouffons 
or to the Opera with M. de Beauseant and M. d’Ajuda-Pinto ; 
and M. de Beauseant, like a well-bred man of the world, 
always left his wife and the Portuguese as soon as he had 
installed them. But M. d’Ajuda-Pinto must marry, and a 
Mile, de Rochefide was the young lady. In the whole fash - . 
ionable world there was but one person who as yet knew 
nothing of the arrangement, and that was Mme. de Beauseant. 
Some of her friends had hinted at the possibility, and she had 


FATHER COR /OT. 


71 


laughed at them, believing that envy had prompted those 
ladies to try to make mischief. And now, though the banns 
were about to be published, and although the handsome 
Portuguese had come that day to break the news to the 
Vicomtesse, he had not found courage as yet to say one word 
about his treachery. How was it? Nothing is doubtless more 
difficult than the notification of an ultimatum of this kind. 
There are men who feel more at their ease when they stand 
up before another man who threatens their lives with sword 
or pistol than in the presence of a woman who, after two 
hours of lamentations and reproaches, falls into a dead swoon 
and requires salts. At this moment, therefore, M. d’Ajuda- 
Pinto was on thorns, and anxious to take his leave. He told 
himself that in some way or other the news would reach Mme. 
de Beauseant ; he would write, it would be much better to do 
it by letter, and not to utter the words that should stab her 
to the heart. 

So when the servant announced M. Eugene de Rastignac, 
the Marquis d’Ajuda-Pinto trembled with joy. To be sure, 
a loving woman shows even more ingenuity in inventing 
doubts of her lover than in varying the monotony of his 
happiness; and when she is about to be forsaken, she instinc- 
tively interprets every gesture as rapidly as Virgil’s courser 
detected the presence of his companion by snuffing the breeze. 
It was impossible, therefore, that Mme. de Beauseant should 
not detect that involuntary thrill of satisfaction ; slight though 
it was, it was appalling in its artlessness. 

Eugene had yet to learn that no one in Paris should present 
himself in any house without first making himself acquainted 
with the whole history of its owner, and of its owner’s wife 
and family, so that he may avoid making any of the terrible 
blunders which in Poland draw forth the picturesque exclama- 
tion, “ Harness five bullocks to your cart ! ” probably because 
you will need them all to pull you out of the quagmire into 
which a false step has plunged you. If, down to the present 


72 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


day, our language has no name for these conversational dis- 
asters, it is probably because they are believed to be impos- 
sible, the publicity given in Paris to every scandal is so 
prodigious. After the awkward incident at Mme. de Restaud’s, 
no one but Eugene could have reappeared in his character of 
bullock-driver in Mme. de Beauseant’s drawing-room. But 
if Mme. de Restaud and M. de Trailles had found him hor- 
ribly in the way, M. d’Ajuda-Pinto hailed his coming with 
relief. 

“Good-by,” said the Portuguese, hurrying to the door, as 
Eugene made his entrance into a dainty little pink-and-gray 
drawing-room, where luxury seemed nothing more than good 
taste. 

“ Until this evening,” said Mme. de Beauseant, turning 
her head to give the Marquis a glance. “ We are going to the 
Bouffons, are we not? ” 

“ I cannot go,” he said, with his fingers on the door- 
handle. 

Mme. de Beauseant rose and beckoned to him to return. 
She did not pay the slightest attention to Eugene, who stood 
there dazzled by the sparkling marvels around him ; he began 
to think that this was some story out of the “ Arabian Nights ” 
made real, and did not know where to hide himself, when the 
woman before him seemed to be unconscious of his existence. 
The Vicomtesse had raised the forefinger of her right hand, 
and gracefully signed to the Marquis to seat himself beside 
her. The Marquis felt the imperious sway of passion in her 
gesture ; he came back towards her. Eugene watched him, 
not without a feeling of envy. 

“ That is the owner of the brougham ! ” he said to himself. 
“ But is it necessary to have a pair of spirited horses, servants 
in livery, and torrents of gold to draw a glance from a woman 
here in Paris? ” 

The demon of luxury gnawed at his heart, greed burned in 
his veins, his throat was parched with the thirst of gold. 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


73 


He had a hundred and thirty francs every quarter. His 
father, mother, brothers, sisters, and aunt did not spend two 
hundred francs a month among them. This swift comparison 
between his present condition and the aims he had in view 
helped to benumb his faculties. 

“ Why not?” the Vicomtesse was saying, as she smiled at 
the Portuguese. “ Why can you not come to the Italiens? ” 

“Affairs ! I am to dine with the English ambassador.” 

“Throw him over.” 

When a man once enters on a course of deception, he is 
compelled to add lie to lie. M. d’Ajuda therefore said, 
smiling, “ Do you lay your commands on me ? ” 

“ Yes, certainly.” 

“That was what I wanted to have you say to me,” he 
answered, dissembling his feelings in a glance which would 
have reassured any other woman. 

He took the Vicomtesse’s hand, kissed it, and went. 

Eugene ran his fingers through his hair, and constrained 
himself to bow. He thought that now Mine, de Beauseant 
would give him her attention ; but suddenly she sprang for- 
ward, rushed to a window in the gallery, and watched 
M. d’Ajuda step into his carriage ; she listened to the order 
that he gave, and heard the Swiss repeat it to the coachman— 

“ To M. de Rochefide’s house.” 

Those words, and the way in which M. d’Ajuda flung him- 
self back in the carriage, were like a lightning flash and a 
thunderbolt for her ; she walked back again with a deadly 
fear gnawing at her heart. The most terrible catastrophes 
only happen among the heights. The Vicomtesse went to her 
own room, sat down at a table, and took up a sheet of dainty 
note-paper. 

“When, instead of dining with the English ambassador,” 
she wrote, “ you go to the Rochefides, you owe me an ex- 
planation, which I am waiting to hear.” 


74 


father go riot. 


She retraced several of the letters, for her hand was trem- 
bling so that they were indistinct ; then she signed the note 
with an initial C. for “ Claire de Bourgogne,” and rang the 
bell. 

“Jacques,” she said to the servant, who appeared imme- 
diately, “ take this note to M. de Rochefide’s house at half- 
past seven, and ask for the Marquis d’Ajuda. It M. d Ajuda 
is there, leave the note without waiting for an answer ; if he 
is not there, bring the note back to me.” 

“ Madame la Vicomtesse, there is a visitor in the drawing- 
room.” 

“Ah! yes, of course,” she said, opening the door. 

Eugene was beginning to feel very uncomfortable, but at 
last the Vicomtesse appeared ; she spoke to him, and the 
tremulous tones of her voice vibrated through his heart. 

“ Pardon me, monsieur,” she said ; “I had a letter to write. 
Now I am quite at liberty.” 

She scarcely knew what she was saying, for even as she 
spoke she. thought, “ Ah ! he means to marry Mile, de Roche- 
fide ! But is he still free? This evening the marriage shall 

be broken off, or else But before to-morrow I shall 

know.” 

“ Cousin ” the student replied. 

“Eh?” said the Countess, with an insolent glance that 
sent a cold shudder through Eugene ; he understood what 
that “Eh?” meant; he had learned a great deal in three 
hours, and his wits were on the alert. He reddened — 

“Madame ” he began; he hesitated a moment, and 

then went on. “ Pardon me; I am in such need of protec- 
tion that the merest scrap of relationship could do me no 
harm.” 

Mine, de Beauseant smiled, but there was sadness in her 
smile; even now she felt forebodings of the coming pain, 
the air she breathed was heavy with the storm that was about 
to burst. 


FATHER GO RIOT 


75 


“ If you knew how my family are situated,” he went on, 
“ you would love to play the part of a beneficent fairy god- 
mother who graciously clears the obstacles from the path of 
her protege.” 

“ Well, cousin,” she said laughing, “and how can I be of 
service to you ? ” 

“ But do I know even that ? Iam distantly related to you, 
and this obscure and remote relationship is even now a per- 
fect godsend to me. You have confused my ideas ; I cannot 
remember the things that I meant to say to you. I know no 

one else here in Paris Ah ! if I could only ask you to 

counsel me, ask you to look upon me as a poor child who 
would fain cling to the hem of your dress, who would lay 
down his life for you.” 

“ Would you kill a man for me?” 

“Two,” said Eugene. 

“You, child ! Yes, you are a child,” she said, keeping 
back the tears that came to her eyes ; “ you would love 
sincerely.” 

“ Oh ! ” he cried, flinging up his head. 

The audacity of the student’s answer interested the Vicom- 
tesse in him. The southern brain was beginning to scheme 
for the first time. Between Mme. de Restaud’s blue boudoir 
and Mme. de Beauseant’s rose-colored drawing-room he had 
made a three years’ advance in a kind of law which is not a 
recognized study in Paris, although it is a sort of higher juris- 
prudence, and, when well understood, is a high-road to suc- 
cess of every kind. 

“Ah! this is what I meant to say!” said Eugene. “I 
met Mme. de Restaud at your ball, and this morning I went 
to see her.” 

“You must have been very much in the way,” said Mme. 
de Beauseant, smiling as she spoke. 

“ Yes, indeed. I am a novice, and my blunders will set 
every one against me, if you do not give me your counsel. I 


76 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


believe that in Paris it is very difficult to meet with a young, 
beautiful, and wealthy woman of fashion who would be will- 
ing to teach me, what you women can explain so well — life. 
I shall find a M. de Trailles everywhere. So I have come to 
you to ask you to give me a key to a puzzle, to entreat you to 
tell me what sort of blunder I made this morning. I men- 
tioned an old man ” 

“ Madame la Duchessede Langeais!” Jacques cut the student 
short ; Eugene gave expression to his intense annoyance by a 
gesture. 

“If you mean to succeed,” said the Vicomtesse in a low 
voice, “ in the first place you must not be so demonstrative.” 

“ Ah ! good-morning, dear,” she continued, and, rising and 
crossing the room, she grasped the Duchess’ hand as affec- 
tionately as if they had been sisters ; the Duchess responded 
in the prettiest and most gracious way. 

“Two intimate friends!” said Rastignac to himself. 
“ Henceforward I shall have two protectresses ; those two 
women are great friends, no doubt, and this new-comer will 
doubtless interest herself in her friend’s cousin.” 

“To what happy inspiration do I owe this piece of good 
fortune, dear Antoinette ? ” asked Mme. de Beauseant. 

“ Well, I saw M. d’Ajuda-Pinto at M. de Rochefide’s door, 
so I thought that if I came I should find you alone.” 

Mme. de Beauseant’s mouth did not tighten, her color did 
not rise, her expression did not alter, or rather, her brow 
seemed to clear as the Duchess uttered those deadly words. 

“ If I had known that you were engaged ” the speaker 

added, glancing at Eugene. 

“This gentleman is M. Eugene de Rastignac, one of my 
cousins,” said the Vicomtesse. “ Have you any news of 
General de Montriveau ? ” she continued. “ Serizy told me 
yesterday that he never goes anywhere now ; has he been to 
see you to-day ? ” 

It was believed that the Duchess was desperately in love 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


77 


with M. de Montriveau, and that he was a faithless lover ; 
she felt the question in her very heart, and her face flushed as 
she answered. 

“ He was at the Elysee yesterday.” 

“ In attendance ? ” 

“ Claire,” returned the Duchess, and hatred overflowed in 
the glances she threw at Mine, de Beauseant ; “ of course you 
know that M. d’Ajuda-Pinto is going to marry Mile, de Roche- 
fide ; the banns will be published to-morrow.” 

This thrust was too cruel ; the Vicomtesse’s face grew 
white, but she answered, laughing, “One of those rumors 
that fools amuse themselves with. What should induce M. 
d’Ajuda to take one of the noblest names in Portugal to the 
Rochefides ? The Rochefides were only ennobled yesterday.” 

“ But Bertha will have two hundred thousand livres a year, 
they say.” 

“ M. d’Ajuda is too wealthy to marry for money.” 

“But, my dear, Mile, de Rochefide is a charming girl.” 

“Indeed ? ” 

“And, as a matter of fact, he is dining with them to-day; 
the thing is settled. It is very surprising to me that you 
should know so little about it.” 

Mine, de Beauseant turned to Rastignac. “What was the 
blunder that you made, monsieur?” she asked. “The poor 
boy is only just launched into the world, Antoinette, so that 
he understands nothing of all this that we are speaking of. 
Be merciful to him, and let us finish our talk to-morrow. 
Everything will be announced to-morrow, you know, and 
your kind informal communication can be accompanied by 
official confirmation.” 

The Duchess gave Eugene one of those insolent glances 
that measure a man from head to foot and leave him crushed 
and annihilated. 

“ Madame, I have unwittingly plunged a dagger into Mine, 
de Restaud’s heart ; unwittingly — therein lies my offense/' 


78 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


said the student of law, whose keen brain had served him suf- 
ficiently well, for he had detected the biting epigrams that 
lurked beneath this friendly talk. “ You continue to receive, 
possibly you fear, those who know the amount of pain that 
they deliberately inflict ; but a clumsy blunderer who has no 
idea how deeply he wounds is looked upon as a fool who does 
not know how to make use of his opportunities, and every 
one despises him.” 

Mme. de Beauseant gave the student a glance, one of those 
glances in which a great soul can mingle dignity and grati- 
tude. It was like balm to the law student, who was still 
smarting under the Duchess’ insolent scrutiny ; she had looked 
at him as an auctioneer might look at some article to appraise 
its value. 

“ Imagine, too, that I had just made some progress with the 
Comte de Restaud ; for I should tell you, madame,” he went 
on, turning to the Duchess with a mixture of humility and 
malice in his manner, “ that as yet I am only a poor devil of 
a student, very much alone in the world, and very poor ” 

“ You should not tell us that, M. de Rastignac. We women 
never care about anything that no one else will take.” 

“Bah!” said Eugene. “I am only two-and-twenty, and 
I must make up my mind to the drawbacks of my time of 
life. Besides, I am confessing my sins, and it would be im- 
possible to kneel in a more charming confessional • you com- 
mit your sins in one drawing-room, and receive absolution for 
them in another.” 

The Duchess’ expression grew colder ; she did not like the 
flippant tone of these remarks, and showed that she considered 
them to be in bad taste by turning to the Vicomtesse with — 
“ This gentleman has only just come ” 

Mme. de Beauseant began to laugh outright at her cousin 
and at the Duchess both. 

“ He has only just come to Paris, dear, and is in search of 
some one who will give him lessons in good taste.” 


FATHER GO RIOT 


79 


“ Mme. la Duchesse,” said Eugene, “is it not natural to 
wish to be initiated into the mysteries which charm us?” 
(“Come, now,” he said to himself, “my language is super- 
finely elegant, I’m sure.”) 

“ But Mme. de Restaud is herself, I believe, M. de Trailles’ 
pupil,” said the Duchess. 

“Of that I had no idea, madame,” answered the law stu- 
dent, “so I rashly came between them. In fact, I got on 
very well with the lady’s husband, and his wife tolerated me 
for a time until I took it into my head to tell them that I 
knew some one of whom I had just caught a glimpse as he 
went out by a back staircase, a man who had given the Coun- 
tess a kiss at the end of a passage.” 

“ Who was it ? ” both women asked together. 

“ An old man who lives at the rate of two louis a month in 
the Faubourg Saint-Marceau, where I, a poor student, lodge 
likewise. He is a truly unfortunate creature, everybody laughs 
at him — we call him old Goriot.” 

“Why, child that you are,” cried the Vicomtesse, “Mme. 
de Restaud was a Mile. Goriot ! ” 

“'The daughter of a vermicelli manufacturer,” the Duchess 
added ; “and when the little creature went to court, the daugh- 
ter of a pastry-cook was presented on the same day. Do you 
remember, Claire? The King began to laugh, and made 
some joke in Latin about flour. People — what was it ? — ■ 
people ” 

“ Ejusde?n farina ,” said Eugene. 

“Yes, that was it,” said the Duchess. 

“ Oh 1 is that her father?” the law student continued, 
aghast. 

“Yes, certainly; the old man had two daughters; he dotes 
on them, so to speak, though they will scarcely acknowledge 
him.” 

“Didn’t the second daughter marry a banker with a Ger- 
man name?” the Vicomtesse asked, turning to Mme. de 


i 


i 


80 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


Langeais, “ a Baron de Nucingen ? And her name is Del- 
phine, is it not? Isn’t she a fair-haired woman who has a 
side-box at the Opera? She comes sometimes to the Bouffons, 
and laughs loudly to attract attention.” 

The Duchess smiled and said — 

“I wonder at you, dear. Why do you take so much in- 
terest in people of that kind ? One must have been as madly 
in love as Restaud was, to be infatuated with Mile. Anastasie 
and her flour-sacks. Oh ! he will not find her a good bar- 
gain ! She is in M. de Trailles’ hands, and he will ruin 
her.” 

“And they do not acknowledge their father!” Eugene 
repeated. 

“Oh ! well, yes, their father, the father, a father,” replied 
the Vicomtesse, “a kind father who gave them each five or 
six hundred thousand francs, it is said, to secure their happi- 
ness by marrying them well ; while he only kept eight or ten 
thousand livres a year for himself, thinking that his daughters 
would always be his daughters, thinking that in them he 
would live his life twice over again, that in their houses he 
should find two homes, where he would be loved and looked 
up to, and made much of. And in two years’ time both his 
sons-in-law had turned him out of their houses as if he were 
one of the lowest outcasts.” 

Tears came into Eugene’s eyes. He was still under the 
spell of youthful beliefs, he had but just left home, pure and 
sacred feelings had been stirred within him, and this was his 
first day on the battlefield of civilization in Paris. Genuine 
feeling is so infectious that for a moment the three looked at 
each other in silence. 

“Well, my God!” said Mme. de Langeais; “yes, it 
seems very horrible, and yet we see such things every day. 
Is there not a reason for it? Tell me, dear, have you ever 
really thought what a son-in-law is? A son-in-law is the man 
for whom we bring up, you and I, a dear little one, bound to 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


81 


us very closely in innumerable ways ; for seventeen years she 
will be the joy of her family, its ‘white soul,’ as Lamartine 
says, and suddenly she will become its scourge. When he 
comes and takes her from us, his love from the very begin- 
ning is like an axe laid to the root of all the old affection in 
our darling’s heart, and all the ties that bound her to her 
family are severed. But yesterday our little daughter thought 
of no one but her mother and father, as we had no thought 
that was not for her ; by to-morrow she will have become a 
hostile stranger. The tragedy is always going on under our 
eyes. On the one hand you see a father who has sacrificed 
himself to his son, and his daughter-in-law shows him the last 
degree of insolence. On the other hand, it is the son-in-law 
who turns his wife’s mother out of the house. I sometimes 
hear it said that there is nothing dramatic about society in 
these days; but the Drama of the Son-in-law is appalling, to 
say nothing of our marriages, which have come to be very 
poor farces. I can explain how it all came about in the old 
vermicelli-maker’s case. I think I recollect that Foriot — ” 

“ Goriot, madame.” 

“Yes, that Moriot was once president of his section dur- 
ing the Revolution. He was in the secret of the famous 
scarcity of grain, and laid the foundation of his fortune in 
those days by selling flour for ten times its cost. He had as 
much flour as he wanted. My grandmother’s steward sold 
him immense quantities. No doubt Noriot shared the plunder 
with the Committee of Public Salvation, as that sort of per- 
son always did. I recollect the steward telling my grand- 
mother that she might live at Grand villiers in complete security, 
because her corn was as good as a certificate of civism. Well, 
then, this Loriot, who sold corn to those butchers, has never 
had but one passion, they say — he idolizes his daughters. He 
settled one of them under Restaud’s roof, and grafted the 
other into the Nucingen family tree, the Baron de Nucingen 
being a rich banker who had turned Royalist. You can quite 
6 


82 


FATHER G OR 10 T. 


understand that so long as Bonaparte was Emperor, the two 
sons-in-law could manage to put up with old Ninety-three ; 
but after the restoration of the Bourbons, M. de Restaud felt 
bored by the old man’s society, and the banker was still more 
tired of it. His daughters were still fond of him ; they 
wanted ‘ to keep the goat and the cabbage,’ so they used to 
see the Joriot whenever there was no one there, under pre- 
tense of affection. ‘Come to-day, papa, we shall have you 
all to ourselves, and that will be much nicer ! ’ and all that 
sort of thing. As for me, dear, I believe that love has second 
sight : poor Ninety-three, his heart must have bled ! He saw 
that his daughters were ashamed of him, that if they loved their 
husbands his visits must make mischief. So he immolated 
himself. He made the sacrifice because he was a father; he 
went into voluntary exile. His daughters were satisfied, so 
he thought that he had done the best thing he could ; but it was 
a family crime, and father and daughters were accomplices. 
You see this sort of thing everywhere. What could this Father 
Doriot have been but a splash of mud in his daughters’ draw- 
ing-rooms? He would only have been in the way and bored 
other people, besides being bored himself. And this that 
happened between father and daughters may happen to the 
prettiest woman in Paris and the man she loves best ; if 
her love grows tiresome, he will go ; he will descend to the 
basest trickery to leave her. It is the same with all love 
and friendship. Our heart is a treasury; if you pour out all 
its wealth at once, you are bankrupt. We show no more 
mercy to the affection that reveals its utmost extent than we do 
to another kind of prodigal who has not a penny left. Their 
father had given them all he had. For twenty years he had 
given his whole heart to them ; then, one day, he gave them 
all his fortune too. The lemon was squeezed ; the girls left 
the rest in the gutter.” 

“The world is very base,” said the Vicomtesse, plucking 
at the threads of her shawl. See did not raise her eyes as 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


83 


she spoke; the words that Mine, de Langeais had meant for 
her in the course of the story had cut her to the quick. 

“Base? Oh, no,” answered the Duchess; “the world 
goes its own way, that is all. If I speak in this way, it is 
only to show that I am not duped by it. I think as you do,” 
she said, pressing the Vicomtesse’s hand. “ The world is a 
slough ; let us try to live on the heights above it.” 

She rose to her feet and kissed Mme. de Beauseant on the 
forehead as she said : “ You look very charming to-day, dear. 
I have never seen such a lovely color in your cheeks before.” 

Then she went out, with a slight inclination of the head to 
the cousin. 

“ Father Goriot is sublime ! ” said Eugene to himself, as 
he remembered how he had watched his neighbor work the 
silver vessel into a shapeless mass that night. 

Mme. de Beauseant did not hear him ; she was absorbed in 
her own thoughts. For several minutes the silence remained 
unbroken till the law student became almost paralyzed with 
embarrassment, and was equally afraid to go or stay or speak 
a word. 

“ The world is basely ungrateful and ill-natured,” said the 
Vicomtesse at last. “ No sooner does a trouble befall you 
than a friend is ready to bring the tidings and to probe your 
heart with the point of a dagger while calling on you to 
admire the handle. Epigrams and sarcasms already ! Ah ! 
I will defend myself! ” 

She raised her head like the great lady that she was, and 
lightnings flashed from her proud eyes. 

“ Ah ! ” she said, as she saw Eugene, “ are you there? ” 

“Still,” he said piteously. 

“ Well, then, M. de Rastignac, deal with the world as it 
deserves. You are determined to succeed ? I will help you. 
You shall sound the depths of corruption in woman ; you 
shall measure the extent of man’s pitiful vanity. Deeply as I 
am versed in such learning, there were pages in the book of 


84 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


life that I had not read. Now I know all. The more cold- 
blooded your calculations, the farther you will go. Strike 
ruthlessly; you will be feared. Men and women for you 
must be nothing more than post-horses ; take a fresh relay, 
and leave the last to drop by the roadside ; in this way you 
will reach the goal of your ambition. You will be nothing 
here, you see, unless a woman interests herself in you ; and 
she must be young and wealthy, and a woman of the world. 
Yet, if you have a heart, lock it carefully away like a trea- 
sure ; do not let any one suspect it, or you will be lost ; you 
would cease to be the executioner, you would take the victim’s 
place. And if ever you should love, never let your secret 
escape you ! Trust no one until you are very sure of the heart 
to which you open your heart. Learn to mistrust every one ; 
take every precaution for the sake of the love which does not 
exist as yet. Listen, Miguel ” — the name slipped from her so 
naturally that she did not notice her mistake — “ there is some- 
thing still more appalling than the ingratitude of daughters 
who have cast off their old father and wish that he were dead, 
and that is a rivalry between the two sisters. Restaud comes 
of a good family ; his wife has been received into their circle ; 
she has been presented at court ; and her sister, her wealthy 
sister, Mme. Delphine de Nucingen, the wife of a great 
capitalist, is consumed with envy, and ready to die of spleen. 
There is a gulf set between the sisters — indeed, they are 
sisters no longer — the two women who refuse to acknowledge 
their father do not acknowledge each other. So Mme. de 
Nucingen would lap all the mud that lies between the Rue 
Saint-Lazare and the Rue de Grenelle to gain admittance to 
. my salon. She fancied that she should gain her end through 
de Marsay ; she has made herself de Marsay’s slave, and she 
bores him. De Marsay cares very little about her. If you 
will introduce her to me, you will be her darling, her Ben- 
jamin ; she will idolize you. If, after that, you can love her, 
do so ; if not, make her useful. I will ask her to come once 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


85 


or twice to one of my great crushes, but I will never receive 
her here in the morning. I will bow to her when I see her, 
and that will be quite sufficient. You have shut the Comtesse 
de Restaud’s door against you by mentioning Father Goriot’s 
name. Yes, my good friend, you may call at her house 
twenty times, and every time out of the twenty you will find 
that she is not at home. The servants have their orders, and 
will not admit you. Very well, then, now let Father Goriot 
gain the right of entry into her sister’s house for you. The 
beautiful Mme. de Nucingen will give the signal for a battle. 
As soon as she singles you out, other women will begin to lose 
their heads about you, and her enemies and rivals and inti- 
mate friends will all try to take you from her. There are 
women who will fall in love with a man because another 
woman has chosen him ; like the city madames, poor things, 
who copy our millinery, and hope thereby to acquire our 
manners. You will have a success, and in Paris success is 
everything ; it is the key of power. If the women credit you 
with wit and talent, the men will follow suit so long as you 
do not undeceive them yourself. There will be nothing you 
may not aspire to; you will go everywhere, and you will find 
out what the world is — an assemblage of fools and knaves. 
But you must be neither the one nor the other. I am giving 
you my name like Ariadne’s clue of thread to take with you 
into this labyrinth ; make no unworthy use of it,” she said, 
with a queenly glance and curve of her throat ; “ give it back 
to me unsullied. And now, go ; leave me. We women also 
have our battles to fight.” 

“ And if you should ever need some one who would gladly 
set a match to a train for you ” 

“ Well ? ” she asked. 

He tapped his heart, smiled in answer to his cousin’s smile, 
and went. 

It was five o’clock, and Eugene was hungry ; he was afraid 
lest he should not be in time for dinner, a misgiving which 


86 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


made him feel that it was pleasant to be borne so quickly 
across Paris. This sensation of physical comfort lelt his 
mind free to grapple with the thoughts that assailed him. A 
mortification usually sends a young man of his age into a 
furious rage ; he shakes his fists at society, and vows ven- 
geance when his belief in himself is shaken. Just then Ras- 
tignac was overwhelmed by the words, “You have shut the 
Countess’ door against you.” 

“I shall call!” he said to himself, “and if Mme, de 

Beauseant is right, if I never find her at home — I well, 

Mme. de Restaud shall meet me in every salon in Paris. 1 
will learn to fence, and have some pistol practice, and kill 
that Maxime of hers ! ” 

“And money?” cried an inward monitor. “ How about 
money, where is that to come from? ” And all at once the 
wealth displayed in the Comtesse de Restaud’s drawing-room 
rose before his eyes. That was the luxury which Goriot’s 
daughter had loved too well ; the gilding, the ostentatious 
splendor, the unintelligent luxury of the parvenu, the riotous 
extravagance of a courtesan. Then the attractive vision sud- 
denly went under an eclipse as he remembered the stately 
grandeur of the Hotel de Beauseant. As his fancy wandered 
among these lofty regions in the great world of Paris, innu- 
merable dark thoughts gathered in his heart ; his ideas wid- 
ened, and his conscience grew more elastic. He saw the 
world as it is ; saw how the rich lived beyond the jurisdiction 
of law and public opinion, and found in success the world’s 
last argument. 

“ Vautrin is right, success is virtue ! ” he said to himself. 

Arrived in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve, he rushed up to 
his room for ten francs wherewith to satisfy the demands of 
the cabman, and went in to dinner. He glanced round the 
squalid room, saw the eighteen poverty-stricken creatures 
gbout to feed like cattle in their stalls, and the sight filled 



FATHER GO RIOT. 


87 


him with loathing. The transition was too sudden, and the 
contrast was so violent that it could not but act as a power- 
ful stimulant ; his ambition developed and grew beyond all 
bounds. On the one hand, he beheld a vision of social life 
in its most charming and refined forms, of quick-pulsed youth, 
of fair, impassioned faces invested with all the charm of poe- 
try, framed in a marvelous setting of luxury or art ; and, on 
the other hand, he saw a sombre picture, the miry verge be- 
yond these faces, in which passion was extinct and nothing 
was left of the drama but the cords and pulleys and bare 
mechanism. Mme. de Beauseant’s counsels, the words uttered 
in anger by the forsaken lady, her petulant offer, came to his 
mind, and poverty was a ready expositor. Rastignac deter- 
mined to open two parallel trenches, so as to insure success ; 
he would be a learned doctor of law and a man of fashion. 
Clearly he was still a child ! Those two lines are asymptotes, 

and will never meet. 

* 

“ You are very dull, my lord marquis,” said Vautrin, with 
one of the shrewd glances that seem to read the innermost 
secrets of another mind. 

“ I am not in the humor to stand jokes from people who 
call me ‘my lord marquis,’ ” answered Eugene. “A marquis 
here in Paris, if he is not the veriest sham, ought to have a 
hundred thousand livres a year at least ; and a lodger in the 
Maison Vauquer is not exactly fortune’s favorite.” 

Vautrin’s glance at Rastignac was half-paternal, half-con- 
temptuous. “ Puppy ! ” it seemed to say ; “I should make 
one mouthful of him ! ” Then he answered — 

“You are in a bad humor; perhaps your visit to the 
beautiful Comtesse de Restaud was not a success.” 

“ She has shut her door against me because I told her that 
her father dined at our table,” cried Rastignac. 

Glances were exchanged all round the room ; Father Goriot 
looked down. 

“You have sent some snuff into my eye,” he said to his 

D 


88 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


neighbor, turning a little aside to rub his hand over his 
face. 

“Any one who molests Father Goriot will have hencefor- 
ward to reckon with me,” said Eugene, looking at the old 
man’s neighbor ; “ he is worth all the rest of us put together 
— I am not speaking of the ladies,” he added, turning in the 
direction of Mile. Taillefer. 

Eugene’s remarks produced a sensation, and his tone silenced 
the dinner table. Vautrin alone spoke. “ If you are going 
to champion Father Goriot, and set up for his responsible 
editor into the bargain, you had need be a crack-shot and 
know how to handle the foils,” he said, banteringly. 

“ So I intend,” said Eugene. 

“ Then are you taking the field to-day ? ” 

“Perhaps,” Rastignac answered. “ But I owe no account 
of myself to any one, especially as I do not try to find out 
what other people do of a night.” 

Vautrin looked askance at Rastignac. 

“If you do not mean to be deceived by the puppets, my 
boy, you must go behind and see the whole show, and not 
peep through holes in the curtain. That is enough,” he 
added, seeing that Eugene was about to fly into a passion. 
“We can have a little talk whenever you like.” 

There was a general feeling of gloom and constraint. 
Father Goriot was so deeply dejected by the student’s remark 
that he did not notice the change in the disposition of his 
fellow-lodgers, nor know that he had met with a champion 
capable of putting an end to the persecution. 

“ Then, M. Goriot sitting there is the father of a countess,” 
said Mme. Vauquer in a low voice. 

“ And of a baroness,” answered Rastignac. 

“That is about all he is capable of,” said Bianchon to 
Rastignac ; “ I have taken a look at his head ; there is only one 
bump — the bump of paternity ; he must be an eternal father." 

Eugdne was too intent on his thoughts to laugh at Bianchon’s 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


89 


joke. He determined to profit by Mme. de Beauseant’s coun- 
sels, and was asking himself how he could obtain the necessary 
money. He grew grave. The wide savannas of the world 
stretched before his eyes ; all things lay before him, nothing 
was his. Dinner came to an end, the others went, and he was 
left in the dining-room. 

“So you have seen my daughter ? ” Goriot spoke trem- 
ulously, and the sound of his voice broke in upon Eugene’s 
dreams. The young man took the elder’s hand, and looked 
at him with something like kindness in his eyes. 

“ You are a good and noble man,” he said. “ We will 
have some talk about your daughters by and by.” 

He rose without waiting for Goriot’s answer, and went to 
his room. There he wrote the following letter to his mother : 

“My dear Mother: — Can you nourish your child from 
your breast again ? I am in a position to make a rapid for- 
tune, but I want twelve hundred francs — I must have them 
at all costs. Say nothing about this to my father; perhaps 
he might make objections, and unless I have the money, I 
may be led to put an end to myself, and so escape the clutches 
of despair. I will tell you everything when I see you. I 
will not begin to try to describe my present situation ; it 
would take volumes to put the whole story clearly and fully. 
I have not been gambling, my kind mother, I owe no one a 
penny ; but if you would preserve the life that you gave me, 
you must send me the sum I mention. As a matter of fact, I 
go to see the Vicomtesse de Beauseant ; she is using her influ- 
ence for me ; I am obliged to go into society, and I have 
not a penny to lay out on clean gloves. I can manage to 
exist on bread and water, or go without food, if need be, but 
I cannot do without the tools with which they cultivate the 
vineyards in this country. I must resolutely make up my 
mind at once to make my way, or stick in the mire for the 
rest of my days. I know that all your hopes are set on me. 


90 


FATHER G OR 10 T. 


and I want to realize them quickly. Sell some of your old 
jewelry, my kind mother ; I will give you other jewels very 
soon. I know enough of our affairs at home to know all that 
such a sacrifice means, and you must not think that I would 
lightly ask you to make it ; I should be a monster if I could. 
You must think of my entreaty as a cry forced from me by 
imperative necessity. Our whole future lies in the subsidy 
with which I must begin my first campaign, for life in Paris 
is one continual battle. If you cannot otherwise procure the 
whole of the money, and are forced to sell our aunt’s lace, 
tell her that I will send her some still handsomer,” and so 
forth. 

He wrote to ask each of his sisters for their savings — would 
they despoil themselves for him, and keep the sacrifice a secret 
from the family ? To his request he knew that they would 
not fail to respond gladly, and he added to it an appeal to 
their delicacy by touching the chord of honor that vibrates so 
loudly in young and highly strung natures. 

Yet when he had written the letters, he could not help 
feeling misgivings in spite of his youthful ambition ; his heart 
beat fast, and he trembled. He knew the spotless nobleness 
of the lives buried away in the lonely manor house ; he knew 
what trouble and what joy his request would cause his sisters, 
and how happy they would be as they talked at the bottom of 
the orchard of that dear brother of theirs in Paris. Visions 
rose before his eyes ; a sudden strong light revealed his sisters 
secretly counting over their little store, devising some girlish 
stratagem by which the money could be sent to him incognito , 
essaying, for the first time in their lives, a piece of deceit that 
reached the sublime in its unselfishness. 

“A sister’s heart is a diamond for purity, a deep sea of 
tenderness ! ” he said to himself. He felt ashamed of those 
letters. 

What power there must be in the petitions put up by such 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


91 


hearts ; how pure the fervor that bears their souls to heaven 
in prayer ! What exquisite joy they would find in self-sacri- 
fice ! What a pang for his mother’s heart if she could not 
send him all that he asked for ! And this noble affection, 
these sacrifices made at such terrible cost, were to serve as the 
ladder by which he meant to climb to Delphine de Nucingen. 
A few tears, like the last grains of incense flung upon the 
sacred altar fire of the hearth, fell from his eyes. He walked 
up and down, and despair mingled with his emotion. Father 
Goriot saw him through the half-open door. 

“What is the matter, sir?” he asked from the threshold. 

“ Ah ! my good neighbor, I am as much a son and brother 
as you are a father. You do well to fear for the Comtesse 
Anastasie ; there is one M. Maxime de Trailles, who will be 
her ruin.” 

Father Goriot withdrew, stammering some words, but 
Eugene failed to catch their meaning. 

The next morning Rastignac went out to post his letters. 
Up to the last moment he wavered and doubted, but he ended 
by flinging them into the box. “ I shall succeed ! ” he said 
to himself. So says the gambler; so says the great captain ; 
but the three words that have been the salvation of some few 
have been the ruin of many more. 

A few days after this Eugene called at Mme. de Restaud’s 
house ; she was not at home. Three times he tried the exper- 
iment, and three times he found her doors closed against him, 
though he was careful to choose an hour when M. de Trailles 
was not there. The Vicomtesse was right. 

The student studied no longer. He put in an appearance 
at lectures simply to answer to his name, and, after thus attest- 
ing his presence, departed forthwith. He had been through 
a reasoning process familiar to most students. He had seen 
the advisability of deferring his studies to the last moment 
before going up for his examinations; he made up his mind 
to cram his second and third year’s work into the third year, 


92 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


when he meant to begin to work in earnest and to complete 
his studies in law with one great effort. In the meantime he 
had fifteen months in which to navigate the ocean of Paris, to 
spread the nets and set the lines that should bring him a 
protectress and a fortune. Twice during that week he saw 
Mme. de Beauseant ; he did not go to her house until he had 
seen the Marquis d’Ajuda drive away. 

Victory for yet a few more days was with the great lady, the 
most poetic figure in the Faubourg Saint-Germain ; and the 
marriage of the Marquis d’Ajuda-Pinto with Mile, de Roche- 
fide was postponed. The dread of losing her happiness filled 
those days with a fever of joy unknown before, but the end 
was only so much the nearer. The Marquis d’Ajuda and the 
Rochefides agreed that this quarrel and reconciliation was a 
very fortunate thing; Mme. de Beausdant (so they hoped) 
would gradully become reconciled to the idea of the marriage, 
and in the end would be brought to sacrifice d’Ajuda’s morn- 
ing visits to the exigencies of a man’s career, exigencies 
which she must have foreseen. In spite of the most solemn 
promises, daily renewed, M. d’Ajuda was playing a part, and 
the Vicomtesse was eager to be deceived. “ Instead of taking 
the leap heroically from the window, she is falling headlong 
down the staircase,” said her most intimate friend, the 
Duchesse de Langeais. Yet this after-glow of happiness lasted 
long enough for the Vicomtesse to be of service to her young 
cousin. She had a half-superstitious affection for him. Eugene 
had shown her sympathy and devotion at a crisis when a 
woman sees no pity, no real comfort in any eyes ; when if a 
man is ready with soothing flatteries, it is because he has an 
interested motive. 

Rastignac made up his mind that he must learn the whole of 
Goriot’s previous history; he would come to his bearings 
before attempting to board the Maison de Nucingen. The 
results of his inquiries may be given briefly as follows : 

In the days before the Revolution, Jean-Joachim Goriot 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


93 


was simply a workman in the employ of a vermicelli-maker. 
He was a skillful, thrifty workman, sufficiently enterprising to 
buy his master’s business when the latter fell a chance victim 
to the disturbances of 1789. Goriot established himself in 
the Rue de la Jussienne, close to the Corn Exchange. His 
plain good sense led him to accept the position of president 
of the section, so as to secure for his business the protection 
of those in power at that dangerous epoch. This prudent step 
had led to success ; the foundations of his fortune were laid 
in the time of the scarcity (real or artificial), when the price 
of grain of all kinds rose enormously in Paris. People used 
to fight for bread at the bakers’ doors ; while other persons 
went to the grocers’ shops and bought Italian paste foods 
without brawling over it. It was during this year that Goriot 
made the money, which, at a later time, was to give him all 
the advantage of the great capitalist over the small buyer ; he 
had, moreover, the usual luck of average ability ; his medi- 
ocrity was the salvation of him. He excited no one’s envy ; 
it was not even suspected that he was rich till the peril of 
being rich was over, and all his intelligence was concentrated, 
not on political, but on commercial speculations. Goriot was 
an authority second to none on all questions relating to corn, 
flour, and “middlings; ” and the production, storage, and 
quality of grain. He could estimate the yield of the harvest, 
and foresee market prices ; he bought his cereals in Sicily, 
and imported Russian wheat. Any one who had heard him 
hold forth on the regulations that control the importation and 
exportation of grain, who had seen his grasp of the subject, 
his clear insight into the principles involved, his appreciation 
of weak points in the way that the system worked, would have 
thought that here was the stuff of which a minister is made. 
Patient, active, and persevering, energetic and prompt in 
action, he surveyed his business horizon with an eagle’s eye. 
Nothing there took him by surprise ; he foresaw all things, 
knew all that was happening, and kept his own counsel ; he 


04 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


was a diplomatist in his quick comprehension of a situation ; 
and in the routine of business he was as patient and plodding 
as a soldier on the march. But beyond this business horizon 
he could not see. He used to spend his hours of leisure on 
the threshold of his shop, leaning against the framework of 
the door. Take him from his dark little counting-house, and 
he became once more the rough, slow-witted workman, a man 
who cannot understand a piece of reasoning, who is indifferent 
to all intellectual pleasures, and falls asleep at the play, 
a Parisian Dolibom in short, against whose stupidity other 
minds are powerless. 

Natures of this kind are nearly all alike ; in almost all of 
them you will find some hidden depth of sublime affection. 
Two all-absorbing affections filled the vermicelli-maker’s 
heart to the exclusion of every other feeling ; into them he 
seemed to put all the forces of his nature, as he put the whole 
power of his brain into the corn trade. He had regarded his 
wife, the only daughter of a rich farmer of La Brie, with a 
devout admiration ; his love for her had been boundless. 
Goriot had felt the charm of a lovely and sensitive nature, 
which, in its delicate strength, was the very opposite of his 
own. Is there any instinct more deeply implanted in the 
heart of man than the pride of protection, a protection which 
is constantly exerted for a fragile and defenseless creature? 
Join love thereto, the warmth of gratitude that all generous 
souls feel for the source of their pleasures, and you have the 
explanation of many strange incongruities in human nature. 

After seven years of unclouded happiness, Goriot lost his 
wife. It was very unfortunate for him. She was beginning 
to gain an ascendency over him in other ways; possibly she 
might have brought that barren soil under cultivation, she 
might have widened his ideas and given other directions to 
his thoughts. But when she was dead, the instinct of father- 
hood developed in him till it almost became a mania. All 
the affection balked by death seemed to turn to his daughters, 


FATHER GORIOT. 


95 


and he found full satisfaction for his heart in loving them. 
More or less brilliant proposals were made to him from time 
to time ; wealthy merchants or farmers with daughters vied 
with each other in offering inducements to him to marry 
again ; but he determined to remain a widower. His father- 
in-law, the only man for whom he felt a decided friendship, 
gave out that Goriot had made a vow to be faithful to his 
wife’s memory. The frequenters of the Corn Exchange, who 
could not comprehend this sublime piece of folly, joked about 
it among themselves, and found a ridiculous nickname for 
him. One of them ventured (after a glass over a bargain) to 
call him by it, and a blow from the vermicelli-maker’s fist 
sent him headlong into a gutter in the Rue Oblin. He could 
think of nothing else when his children were concerned ; his 
love for them made him fidgety and anxious ; and this was 
so well known, that one day a competitor, who wished to get 
rid of him to secure the field to himself, told Goriot that Del- 
phine had just been knocked down by a cab. The vermicelli- 
maker turned ghastly pale, left the Exchange at once, and did 
not return for several days afterwards ; he was ill in conse- 
quence of the shock and the subsequent relief on discovering 
that it was a false alarm. This time, however, the offender 
did not escape with a bruised shoulder ; at a critical moment 
in the man’s affairs, Goriot drove him into bankruptcy, and 
forced him to disappear from the Corn Exchange. 

As might have been expected, the two girls were spoiled. 
With an income of sixty thousand francs, Goriot scarcely 
spent twelve hundred on himself, and found all his happiness 
in satisfying the whims of the two girls. The best masters 
were engaged, that Anastasie and Delphine might be endowed 
with all the accomplishments which distinguish a good educa- 
tion. They had a chaperon — luckily for them, she was a 
woman who had sense and good taste; they learned to ride; 
they had a carriage for their use ; they lived as the mistress 
of a rich old lord might live ; they had only to express a wish, 


96 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


their father would hasten to give them their most extravagant 
desires, and asked nothing of them in return but a kiss. Go- 
riot had raised the two girls to the level of the angels; and, 
quite naturally, he himself was left beneath them. Poor 
man ! he loved them even for the pain that they gave 
him. 

When the girls were old enough to be married, they were 
left free to choose for themselves. Each had half her father’s 
fortune as her dowry ; and when the Comte de Restaud came 
to woo Anastasie for her beauty, her social aspirations led her 
to leave her father’s house for a more exalted sphere. Del- 
phine wished for money ; she married Nucingen, a banker of 
German extraction, who became a baron of the Holy Roman 
Empire. Goriot remained a vermicelli-maker as before. His 
daughters and his sons-in-law began to demur ; they did not 
like to see him still engaged in trade, though his whole life 
was bound up with his business. For five years he stood out 
against their entreaties, then he yielded, and consented to 
retire on the amount realized by the sale of his business and 
the savings of the last few years. It was this capital that 
Mme. Vauquer, in the early days of his residence with her, 
had calculated would bring in eight or ten thousand livres in 
a year. He had taken refuge in her lodging-house, driven 
there by despair when he knew that his daughters were com- 
pelled by their husbands not only to refuse to receive him as 
an inmate in their houses, but even to see him no more except 
in private. 

This was all the information which Rastignac gained from 
a M. Muret who had purchased Goriot’s business, information 
which confirmed the Duchesse de Langeais’ suppositions, and 
herewith the preliminary explanation of this obscure but terri- 
ble Parisian tragedy comes to an end. 

Towards the end of the first week in December Rastignac 
received two letters — one from his mother and one from his 
eldest sister. His heart beat fast, half with happiness, half 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


97 


with fear, at the sight of the familiar handwriting. Those two 
little scraps of paper contained life or death for his hopes. 
But while he felt a shiver of dread as he remembered their 
dire poverty at home, he knew their love for him so well that 
he could not help fearing that he was draining their very life- 
blood. His mother’s letter ran as follows : 

“ My dear Child : — I am sending you the money that you 
asked for. Make a good use of it. Even to save your life I 
could not raise so large a sum a second time without your 
father’s knowledge, and there would be trouble about it. 
We should be obliged to mortgage the land. It is impossible 
to judge of the merits of schemes of which I am ignorant ; but 
what sort of schemes can they be that you should fear to tell 
me about them ! Volumes of explanation would not have 
been needed ; we mothers can understand at a word, and that 
word would have spared me the anguish of uncertainty. I do 
not know how to hide the painful impression that your letter 
has made upon me, my dear son. What can you have felt 
when you were moved to send this chill of dread through my 
heart ? It must have been very painful to you to write the 
letter that gave me so much pain as I read it. To what courses 
are you committed? You are going to appear to be some- 
thing that you are not, and your whole life and success de- 
pends upon this? You are about to see a society into which 
you cannot enter without rushing into expense that you can- 
not afford, without losing precious time that is needed for 
your studies ? Ah ! my dear Eugene, believe your mother, 
crooked ways cannot lead to great ends. Patience and endur- 
ance are the two qualities most needed in your position. I 
am not scolding you; I do not want any tinge of bitterness to 
spoil our offering. I am only talking like a mother whose 
trust in you is as great as her foresight for __ you. You know 
the steps that you must take, and I, for my part, know your 
purity of heart, and how good your intentions are ; so I can 
7 


98 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


say to you without a doubt, ‘ Go forward, beloved ! ’ If I 
tremble, it is because I am a mother, but my prayers and 
blessings will be with you at every step. Be very careful, 
dear boy. You must have a man’s prudence, for it lies with 
you to shape the destinies of five others who are dear to you, 
and must look to you. Yes, our fortunes depend upon you, 
and your success is ours. We all pray to God to be with 
you in all that you do. Your aunt Marcillac has been most 
generous beyond words in this matter ; she saw at once how 
it was, even down to your gloves. ‘ But I have a weakness 
for the eldest ! ’ she said gaily. You must love your aunt 
very much, dear Eugene. I shall wait till you have succeeded 
before telling you all that she has done for you, or her money 
would burn your fingers. You, who are young, do not know 
what it is to part with something that is a piece of your past ! 
But what would we not sacrifice for your sake ? Your aunt 
says that I am to send you a kiss on the forehead from her, and 
that kiss is to bring you luck again and again, she says. She 
would have written to you herself, the dear kind-hearted 
woman, but she is troubled with the gout in her fingers just 
now. Your father is very well. The vintage of 1819 has 
turned out better than we expected. Good-by, dear boy ; I 
will say nothing about your sisters, because Laure is writing 
to you, and I must let her have the pleasure of giving you all 
the home news. Heaven send that you may succeed ! Oh ! 
yes, dear Eugene, you must succeed. I have come, through 
you, to a knowledge of a pain so sharp that I do not think I 
could endure it a second time. I have come to know what it 
is to be poor, and to long for money for my children’s 
sake. There, good-by ! Do not leave us for long without 
news of you ; and here, at the last, take a kiss from your 
mother.” 


By the time Eugene had finished the letter he was in tears. 
He thought of Father Goriot crushing his silver keepsake 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


90 


into a shapeless mass before he sold it to meet his daughter’s 
bill of exchange. 

“ Your mother has broken up her jewels for you,” he said 
to himself; “ your aunt shed tears over those relics of hers be- 
fore she sold them for your sake. What right have you to 
heap execrations on Anastasie ? You have followed her 
example; you have selfishly sacrificed others to your own 
future, and she sacrifices her father to her lover ; and of you 
two, which is the worse? ” 

He was ready to renounce his attempts ; he could not bear 
to take that money. The fires of remorse burned in his 
heart, and gave him intolerable pain, the generous secret re- 
morse which men seldom take into account when they sit in 
judgment upon their fellow-men ; but perhaps the angels in 
heaven, beholding it, pardon the criminal whom our justice 
condemns. Rastignac opened his sister’s letter ; its simplic- 
ity and kindness revived his heart. 

“Your letter came just at the right time, dear brother. 
Agathe and I had thought of so many different ways of spend- 
ing our money, that we did not know what to buy with it ; 
and now you have come in, and, like the servant who upset 
all the watches that belonged to the King of Spain, you have 
restored harmony ; for, really and truly, we did not know 
which of all the things we wanted we needed most, and we 
were always quarreling about it, never thinking, dear Eugene, 
of a way of spending our money which would satisfy us com- 
pletely. Agathe jumped for joy. Indeed, we have been like 
two mad things all day, * to such a prodigious degree ’ (as 
aunt would say), that mother said, with her severe expression, 

4 Whatever can be the matter with you, mesdemoiselles ? ’ I 
think if we had been scolded a little, we should have been 
still better pleased. A woman ought to be very glad to suffer 
for one she loves ! I, however, in my inmost soul, was dole- 
ful and cross in the midst of all my joy. I shall make a bad 


100 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


wife, I am afraid, I am too fond of spending. I had bought 
two sashes and a nice little stiletto for piercing eyelet-holes in 
my stays, trifles that I really did not want, so that I have less 
than that slow-coach Agathe, who is so economical, and 
hoards her money like a magpie. She had two hundred 
francs ! And I have only one hundred and fifty ! I am 
nicely punished ; I could throw my sash down the well ; it 
v/ill be painful to me to wear it now. Poor dear, I have 
robbed you. And Agathe was so nice about it. She said, 
‘ Let us send the three hundred and fifty francs in our two 
names ! ’ But I could not help telling you everything just as 
it happened. 

“ Do you know how we managed to keep your command- 
ments? We took our glittering hoard, we went out for a 
walk, and when once fairly on the highway we ran all the way 
to Ruffec, where we handed over the coin, without more ado, 
to M. Grimbert of the Messageries Royales. We came back 
again like swallows on the wing. ‘ Don’t you think that 
happiness has made us lighter?’ Agathe said. We said all 
sorts of things, which I shall not tell you, Monsieur le 
Parisien, because they were all about you. Oh, we love you 
dearly, dear brother ; it was all summed up in those few 
words. As for keeping the secret, little masqueraders like us 
are capable of anything (according to our aunt), even of 
holding our tongues. Our mother has been on a mysterious 
journey to Angouldme, and the aunt went with her, not with- 
out solemn councils, from which we were shut out, and M. le 
Baron likewise. They are silent as to the weighty political 
considerations that prompted their mission, and conjectures 
are rife in the State of Rastignac. The Infants are embroider- 
ing a muslin robe with open-work sprigs for her majesty the 
Queen ; the work progresses in the most profound secrecy. 
There are but two more breadths to finish. A decree has gone 
forth that no wall shall be built on the side of Yerteuil, but 
that a hedge shall be planted instead thereof. Our subjects 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


101 


may sustain some disappointment of fruit and espaliers, but 
strangers will enjoy a fair prospect. Should the heir-presump- 
tive lack pocket-handkerchiefs, be it known unto him that the 
dowager lady of Marcillac, exploring the recesses of her 
drawers and boxes (known respectively as Pompeii and Her- 
culaneum), having brought to light a fair piece of cambric 
whereof she wotted not, the Princesses Agathe and Laure 
place at their brother’s disposal their thread, their needles, and 
hands somewhat of the reddest. The two young Princes, 
Don Henri and Don Gabriel, retain their fatal habits of stuff- 
ing themselves with grape-jelly, of teasing their sisters, of 
taking their pleasure by going a-birdnesting, and of cutting 
switches for themselves from the osier-beds, maugre the laws 
of the realm. Moreover, they list not to learn aught, where- 
fore the Papal Nuncio (called of the commonalty, M. le 
Cure) threateneth them with excommunication, since that 
they neglect the sacred canons of grammatical construction 
for the construction of other canons, deadly engines made of 
the stems of elder. 

“ Farewell, dear brother, never did letter carry so many 
wishes for your success, so much love fully satisfied. You 
will have a great deal to tell us when you come home ! You 
will tell me everything, won’t you? I am the oldest. From 
something the aunt let fall, we think you must have had some 
success. 


“ * Something was said of a lady, but nothing more was said ’ 

“ Of course not, in our family ! Oh, by-the-by, Eugene, 
would you rather we made that piece of cambric into shirts 
for you instead of pocket-handkerchiefs? If you want some 
really nice shirts at once, we ought to lose no time in begin- 
ning upon them ; and if the fashion is different now in Paris, 
send us one for a pattern ; we want more particularly to know 
about the cuffs. Good-by ! good-by ! Take my kiss on the 


102 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


left side of your forehead, on the temple that belongs to me, and 
to no one else in the world. I am leaving the other side of the 
sheet for Agathe, who has solemnly promised not to read a 
word that I have written ; but, all the same, I mean to sit by 
her while she writes, so as to be quite sure that she keeps her 
word. Your loving sister, 

“Laure de Rastignac.” 

“Yes!” said Eugdne to himself. “ Yes ! Success at all 
costs now ! Riches could not repay such devotion as this. 
I wish I could give them every sort of happiness ! Fifteen 
hundred and fifty francs,” he went on after a pause. “ Every 
shot must go to the mark ! Laure is right. Trust a woman ! 
I have only calico shirts. Where some one else's welfare is 
concerned, a young girl becomes as ingenious as a thief. 
Guileless where she herself is in question, and full of fore- 
sight for me — she is like a heavenly angel forgiving the strange 
incomprehensible sins of earth.” 

The world lay before him. His tailor had been summoned 
and sounded, and had finally surrendered. When Rastignac 
met M. de Trailles, he had seen at once how great a part the 
tailor plays in a young man’s career ; a tailor is either a deadly 
enemy or a stanch friend, with an invoice for a bond of 
friendship ; between these two extremes there is, alack ! no 
middle term. In this representative of his craft Eugene dis- 
covered a man who understood that his was a sort of paternal 
function for young men at their entrance into life, who re- 
garded himself as a stepping-stone between a young man’s 
present and future. And Rastignac in gratitude made the 
man’s fortune by an epigram of a kind in which he excelled 
at a later period of his life. 

“I have twice known a pair of trousers turned out by him 
make a match of twenty thousand livres a year ! ” 

Fifteen hundred francs, and as many suits of clothes as he 
chose to order ! At that moment the poor child of the south 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


103 


felt no more doubts of any kind. The young man went down 
to breakfast with the indefinable air which the consciousness 
of the possession of money gives to youth. No sooner are 
the coins slipped into a student’s pocket than his wealth, in 
imagination at least, is piled into a fantastic column, which 
affords him a moral support. He begins to hold up his head 
as he walks ; he is conscious that he has a means of bringing 
his power to bear on a given point ; he looks you straight in 
the face ; his gestures are quick and decided ; only yesterday 
he was diffident and shy, any one might have pushed him 
aside ; to-morrow he will take the walk of a prime minister. 
A miracle has been wrought in him. Nothing is beyond the 
reach of his ambition, and his ambition soars at random ; he 
is light-hearted, generous, and enthusiastic ; in short, the 
fledgling bird has discovered that he has wings. A poor 
student snatches at every chance pleasure much as a dog runs 
all sorts of risks to steal a bone, cracking it and sucking the 
marrow as he flies from pursuit ; but a young man who can 
rattle a few runaway gold coins in his pocket can take his 
pleasure deliberately, can taste the whole of the sweets of 
secure possession ; he soars far above earth ; he has forgotten 
what the word poverty means ; all Paris is his. Those are 
days when the whole world shines radiant with light, when 
everything glows and sparkles before the eyes of youth, days 
that bring joyous energy that is never brought into harness, 
days of debts and of painful fears that go hand-in-hand with 
every delight. Those who do not know the left bank of the 
Seine between the Rue Saint-Jacques and the Rue des Saints- 
Peres know nothing of life. 

“Ah! if the women of Paris but knew,” said Rastignac, 
as he devoured Mme. Vauquer’s stewed pears (at five for a 
penny), “ they would come here in search of a lover.” 

Just then a porter from the Royal Express appeared at 
the door of the room ; they had previously heard the bell 
ring as the wicket opened to admit him. The man asked for 


104 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


M. Eugene de Rastignac, holding out two bags for him to 
take, and a form of receipt for his signature. Vautrin’s keen 
glance cut Eugene like a lash. 

“ Now you will be able to pay for those fencing lessons and 
go to the shooting gallery,” he said. 

“Your ship has come in,” said Mme. Vauquer, eyeing 
the bags. 

Mile. Michonneau did not dare to look at the money, for 
fear her eyes should betray her cupidity. 

“You have a kind mother,” said Mme. Couture. 

“ You have a kind mother, sir,” echoed Poiret. 

“Yes, mamma has been drained dry,” said Vautrin, “and 
now you can have your fling, go into society, and fish for 
heiresses, and dance with countesses who have peach blossom 
in their hair. But take my advice, young man, and don’t 
neglect your pistol practice.” 

Vautrin struck an attitude, as if he were facing an antag- 
onist. Rastignac, meaning to give the porter a tip, felt in 
his pockets and found nothing. Vautrin flung down a franc- 
piece on the table. 

“ Your credit is good,” he remarked, eyeing the student, 
and Rastignac was forced to thank him, though, since the 
sharp encounter of wits at dinner that day, after Eugene came 
in from calling on Mme. de Beaus6ant, he had made up his 
mind that Vautrin was insufferable. For a week, in fact, they 
had both kept silence in each other’s presence, and watched 
each other. The student tried in vain to account to himself 
for this attitude. 

An ide3, of course, gains in force by the energy with which 
it is expressed ; it strikes where the brain sends it, by a law 
as mathematically exact as the law that determines the course 
of a shell from a mortar. The amount of impression it 
makes is not to be determined so exactly. Sometimes, in an 
impressible nature, the idea works havoc, but there are, no 
less, natures so robustly protected, that this sort of projectile 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


105 


falls flat and harmless on skulls of triple brass, as cannon-shot 
against solid masonry ; then there are flaccid and spongy- 
fibred natures into which ideas from without sink like spent 
bullets into the earthworks of a redoubt. Rastignac’s head 
was something of the powder-magazine order ; the least shock 
sufficed to bring about an explosion. He was too quick, too 
young, not to be readily accessible to ideas ; and open to that 
subtle influence of thought and feeling in others which causes 
so many strange phenomena that make an impression upon 
us of which we are all unconscious at the time. Nothing 
escaped his mental vision ; he was lynx-eyed ; in him the 
mental powers of perception, which seem like duplicates of 
the senses, had the mysterious power of swift projection that 
astonishes us in intellects of a high order — slingers who are 
quick to detect the weak spot in any armor. 

In the past month Eugene’s good qualities and defects had 
rapidly developed with his character. Intercourse with the 
world and the endeavor to satisfy his growing desires had 
brought out his defects. But Rastignac came from the south 
side of the Loire, and had the good qualities of his country- 
men. He had the impetuous courage of the south, that 
rushes to the attack of a difficulty, as well as the southern 
impatience of delay or suspense. These traits are held to be 
defects in the north \ they made the fortune of Murat, but 
they likewise cut short his career. The moral would appear 
to be that when the dash and boldness of the south side of the 
Loire meets, in a southern temperament, with the guile of 
the north, the character is complete, and such a man will 
gain (and keep) the crown of Sweden. 

Rastignac, therefore, could not stand the fire from Vautrin s 
batteries for long without discovering whether this was a 
friend or a foe. He felt as if this strange being was reading 
his inmost soul and dissecting his feelings, while Vautrin 
himself was so close and secretive that he seemed to have 
something of the profound and unmoved serenity of a sphinx, 


106 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


seeing and hearing all things and saying nothing. Eugene, 
conscious of that money in his pocket, grew rebellious. 

“ Be so good as to wait a moment,” he said to Vautrin, as 
the latter rose, after slowly emptying his coffee-cup, sip 
by sip. 

“What for?” inquired the older man, as he put on his 
large-brimmed hat and took up the sword-cane that he was 
wont to twirl like a man who will face three or four footpads 
without flinching. 

“I will repay you in a minute,” returned Eugene. He 
unsealed one of the bags as he spoke, counted out a hundred 
and forty francs, and pushed them towards Mme. Vauquer. 
“Short reckonings make long friends,” he added, turning to 
the widow; “that clears our accounts till the end of the 
year. Can you give me change for a five-franc piece ? ” 

“Good friends make short reckonings,” echoed Poiret, 
with a glance at Vautrin. 

“ Here is your franc,” said Rastignac, holding out the coin 
to the sphinx in the black wig. 

“Any one might think that you were afraid to owe me a 
trifle,” exclaimed the latter, with a searching glance that 
seemed to read the young man’s inmost thoughts; there was 
a satirical and cynical smile on Vautrin’s face such as Eugene 
had seen scores of times already; every time he saw it, it 
exasperated him almost beyond endurance. 

“Well so I am,” he answered. He held both the 

bags in his hand, and had risen to go up to his room. 

Vautrin made as if he were going out through the sitting- 
room, and the student turned to go through the second door 
that opened into the square lobby at the foot of the staircase. 

“ Do you know, Monsieur le Marquis de Rastignacorama, 
that what you were saying just now was not exactly polite ? ” 
Vautrin remarked, as he rattled his sword-cane across the panels 
of the sitting-room door, and came up to the student. 

Rastignac looked coolly at Vautrin, drew him to the foot 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


107 


of the staircase, and shut the dining-room door. They were 
standing in the little square lobby between the kitchen and 
the dining-room ; the place was lighted by an iron-barred 
fanlight above a door that gave access into the garden. Sylvie 
came out of her kitchen, and Eugene chose that moment to 
say — ■ 

“ Monsieur V autrin, I am not a marquis, and my name is 
not Rastignacorama.” 

“They will fight,” said Mile. Michonneau, in an indiffer- 
ent tone. 

“ Fight ! ” echoed Poiret. 

“ Not they,” replied Mme. Vauquer, lovingly fingering 
her pile of coins. 

“But there they are under the lime trees,” cried Mile. 
Victorine, who had risen so that she might see out into the 
garden. “Poor young man ! he was in the right, after all.” 

“We must go upstairs, my pet,” said Mme. Couture; “it 
is no business of ours.” 

At the door, however, Mme. Couture and Victorine found 
their progress barred by the portly form of Sylvie the cook. 

“ What ever can have happened ? ” she said. “ M. Vautrin 
said to M. Eugene, ‘ Let us have an explanation ! ’ then he 
took him by the arm, and there they are, out among the 
artichokes.” 

Vautrin came in while she was speaking. “ Mamma 
Vauquer,” he said, smiling, “don’t frighten yourself at all. 
I am only going to try my pistols under the lime trees.” 

“ Oh ! monsieur,” cried Victorine, clasping her hands as 
she spoke, “ why do you want to kill M. Eugene ? ” 

Vautrin stepped back a pace or two, and gazed at Victorine. 

“ Oh ! this is something fresh ! ” he exclaimed in a banter- 
ing tone, that brought the color into the poor girl’s face. 
“ That young fellow yonder is very nice, isn’t he? ” he went 
on. “You have given me a notion, my pretty child; I will 
make you both happy.” 


108 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


Mme. Couture laid her hand on the arm of her ward, and 
drew the girl away, as she said in her ear — 

“Why, Victorinc, I cannot imagine what has come over 
you this morning.” 

“ I don’t want any shots fired in my garden,” said Mme. 
Vauquer. “ You will frighten the neighborhood and bring 
the police up here all in a moment.” 

“ Come, keep cool, Mamma Vauquer,” answered Vautrin. 
“There, there; it’s all right; we will go to the shooting- 
gallery.” 

He went back to Rastignac, laying his hand familiarly on 
the young man’s arm. 

“ When I have given you ocular demonstrations of the fact 
that I can put a bullet through the ace on a card five times 
running at thirty-five paces,” lie said, “ that won’t take away 
your appetite, I suppose. You look to me to be inclined to 
be a trifle quarrelsome this morning, and as if you would rush 
on your death like a blockhead.” 

“ Do you draw back? ” asked Eugene. 

“ Don’t try to raise my temperature,” answered Vautrin ; 
“ it is not cold this morning. Let us go and sit over there,” 
he added, pointing to the green-painted garden seats ; “ no 
one can overhear us. I want a little talk with you. You are 
not a bad sort of youngster, and I have no quarrel with you. 
I like you, take Tromp — (confound it !) — take Vautrin’s word 
for it. What makes me like you? I will tell you by-and-by. 
Meantime, I can tell you that I know you as well as if I had 
made you myself, as I will prove to you in a minute. Put 
down your bags,” he continued, pointing to the round table. 

Rastignac deposited his money on the table, and sat down. 
He was consumed with curiosity, which the sudden change in 
the manner of the man before him had excited to the highest 
pitch. Here was a strange being who, a moment ago, had 
talked of killing him, and now posed as his protector. 

“You would like to know who I really am, what I was, 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


109 


and what I do now,” Vautrin went on “ You want to know 
too much, youngster. Come ! come ! keep cool ! You will 
hear more astonishing things than that. I have had my mis- 
fortunes. Just hear me out first, and you shall have your turn 
afterwards. Here is my past in three words. Who am I ? 
Vautrin. What do I do? Just what I please. Let us change 
the subject. You want to know my character. I am good- 
natured to those who do me a good turn, or to those whose 
hearts speak to mine. These last may do anything they like 
with me ; they may bruise my shins, and I shall not tell them 
to ‘ mind what they are about ; ’ but, by my pipe, the devil 
himself is not an uglier customer than I can be if people 
annoy me, or if I don’t happen to take to them ; and you 
may just as well know at once that I think no more of killing 
a man than of that,” and he spat before him as he spoke. 
“ Only when it is absolutely necessary to do so, I do my best 
to kill him properly. I am what you call an artist. I have 
read Benvenuto Cellini’s ‘ Memoirs,’ such as you see me ; 
and, what is more, in Italian ! A fine-spirited fellow he was ! 
From him I learned to follow the example set us by Provi- 
dence, who strikes us down at random, and to admire the 
beautiful whenever and wherever it is found. And, setting 
other questions aside, is it not a glorious part to play, when 
you pit yourself against mankind, and the luck is on your 
side ? I have thought a good deal about the constitution of 
your present social dis-order. A duel is downright childish, 
my boy ! utter nonsense and folly ! When one of two living 
men must be gotten out of the way, none but an idiot would 
leave chance to decide which it is to be ; and in a duel it is a 
toss-up — heads or tails — and there you are ! Now I, for in- 
stance, can hit the ace in the middle of a card five times run- 
ning, send one bullet after another through the same hole, 
and at thirty-five paces, moreover ! With that little accom- 
plishment you might think yourself certain of killing your 
man, mightn’t you? Well, I have fired at twenty paces and 


110 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


missed, and the rogue who had never handled a pistol in his 
life — look here!” — (he unbuttoned his waistcoat and ex- 
posed his chest, covered, like a bear’s back, with a shaggy 
fell ; the student gave a startled shudder) — “ he was a raw lad, 
but he made his mark on me,” the extraordinary man went 
on, drawing Rastignac’s fingers over a deep scar on his breast. 
“But that happened when I myself was a mere boy; I was 
one-and-twenty then (your age), and I had some beliefs left — 
in a woman’s love, and in a pack of rubbish that you will be 
over head and ears in directly. You and I were to have 
fought just now, weren’t we? You might have killed me. 
Suppose that I were put under the earth, where would you be? 
You would have to clear out of this, go to Switzerland, draw 
on papa’s purse — and he has none too much in it as it is. I 
mean to open your eyes to your real position, that is what 
I am going to do ; but I shall do it from the point of view 
of a man who, after studying the world very closely, sees that 
there are but two alternatives — stupid obedience or revolt. 
I obey nobody; is that clear? Now, do you know how much 
you will want at the pace you are going? A million; and 
promptly, too, or that little head of ours will be swaying to 
and fro in the drag-nets at Saint-Cloud, while we are gone to 
find out whether or not there is a Supreme Being. I will put 
you in the way of that million.” 

He stopped for a moment and looked at Eugene. 

“Aha! you do not look so sourly at Papa Vautrin now ! 
At the mention of the million you look like a young girl when 
somebody has said, ‘ I will come for you this evening ! ’ and 
she betakes herself to her toilet as a cat licks its whiskers 
over a saucer of milk. All right. Come, now, let us go into 
the question, young man ; all between ourselves, you know. 
We have a papa and a mamma down yonder, a great-aunt, 
two sisters (aged eighteen and seventeen), two young brothers 
(one fifteen and the other ten), that is about the roll-call of 
the crew. The aunt brings up the two sisters ; the cure comes 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


Ill 


and teaches the boys Latin. Boiled chestnuts are oftener on 
the table than white bread. Papa makes a suit of clothes last 
a long while ; if mamma has a different dress winter and sum- 
mer, it is about as much as she has ; the sisters manage as 
best they can. I know all about it ; I have lived in the south. 

“ That is how things are at home. They send you twelve 
hundred francs a year, and the whole property only brings in 
three thousand francs all told. We have a cook and a man- 
servant ; papa is a baron, and we must keep up appearances. 
Then we have our ambitions ; we are connected with the 
Beauseants, and we go afoot through the streets ; we want to 
be rich, and we have not a penny ; we eat Mme. Vauquer’s 
messes, and we like grand dinners in the Faubourg Saint- 
Germain ; we sleep on a truckle-bed, and dream of a mansion ! 
I do not blame you for wanting these things. It is not given 
to every one to have ambition, my little trump. What sort 
of men do the women run after? Men of ambition. Men 
of ambition have stronger frames, their blood is richer in 
iron, their hearts are warmer than those of ordinary men. 
Women feel that when their power is greatest they look their 
best, and that those are their happiest hours ; they like power 
in men, and prefer the strongest even if it is a power that may 
be their own destruction. I am going to make an inventory 
of your desires in order to put the question at issue before 
you. Here it is — 

“ We are as hungry as a wolf, and those newly-cut teeth of 
ours are sharp; what are we to do to keep the pot boiling? 
In the first place, we have the Code to browse upon ; it is not 
amusing, and we are none the wiser for it, but that cannot 
be helped. So far so good. We mean to make an advocate 
of ourselves with a prospect of one day being made president 
of a court of assize, when we shall send poor devils, our 
betters, to the galleys with a T. F.*on their shoulders, so that 
the rich may be convinced that they can sleep in peace. 

* Travaux fords : — forced workers. 


112 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


There is no fun in that ; and you are a long while coming to 
it ; for, to begin with, there are two years of nauseous 
drudgery in Paris, we see all the lollipops that we long for 
out of our reach. It is tiresome to want things and never to 
have them. If you were a pallid creature of the mollusc 
order, you would have nothing to fear, but it is different when 
you have the hot blood of a lion and are ready to get into a 
score of scrapes every day of your life. This is the ghastliest 
form of torture known in this inferno of God’s making, and 
you will give in to it. Or suppose that you are a good boy, 
drink nothing stronger than milk, and bemoan your hard lot ; 
you, with your generous nature, will endure hardships that 
would drive a dog mad, and make a start, after long waiting, 
as deputy to some rascal or other in a hole of a place where 
the government will fling you a thousand francs a year like 
the scraps that are thrown to the butcher’s dog. Bark at 
thieves, plead the cause of the rich, send men of heart to the 
guillotine, that is your work ! Many thanks ! If you have 
no influence, you may rot in your provincial tribunal. At 
thirty you will be a justice with twelve hundred francs a year 
(if you have not flung off the gown for good before then). 
By the time you are forty you may look to marry a miller’s 
daughter, an heiress with some six thousand livres a year. 
Much obliged ! If you have influence, you may possibly be 
public prosecutor by the time you are thirty ; with a salary of 
a thousand crowns, you could look to marry the mayor’s 
daughter. Some petty piece of political trickery, such as 
mistaking Vill61e for Manuel in a bulletin (the names rhyme, 
and that quiets your conscience), and you will probably be 
procureur general by the time you are forty, with a chance of 
becoming a deputy. Please to observe, my dear boy, that 
our conscience will have been a little damaged in the process, 
and that we shall endure twenty years of drudgery and hidden 
poverty, and that our sisters are wearing Diana’s livery. I 
have the honor to call your attention to another fact, to wit : 


FATHER G OR TOT. 


113 


that there are but twenty procureurs g£neraux at a time in all 
trance, while there are some twenty thousand of you young 
men who aspire to that elevated position ; that there are some 
mountebanks among you who would sell their family to screw 
their fortunes a peg higher. If this sort of thing sickens you, 
try another course. The Baron de Rastignac thinks of becom- 
ing an advocate, does he ? There’s a nice prospect for you ! 
Ten years of drudgery straight away. You are obliged to 
live at the rate of a thousand francs a month ; you must have 
a library of law-books, live in chambers, go into society, go 
down on your knees to ask a solicitor for briefs, lick the dust 
off the floor of the Palais de Justice. If this kind of business 
led to anything, I should not say no ; but just give me the 
names of five advocates here in Paris who by the time that 
they are fifty are making fifty thousand francs a year ! Bah ! 
I would sooner turn pirate on the high-seas than have my soul 
shrivel up inside me like that. How will you find the capital? 
There is but one way, marry a woman who has money. There 
is no fun in it. Have you a mind to marry? You hang a 
stone round your neck ; for if you marry for money, what 
becomes of our exalted notions of honor and so forth ? You 
might as well fly in the face of social conventions at once. 
Is it nothing to crawl like a serpent before your wife, to lick 
her mother’s feet, to descend to dirty actions that would 
sicken swine? — faugh ! — never mind if you at least make your 
fortune. But you will be as doleful as a dripstone if you 
marry for money. It is better to wrestle with men than to 
wrangle at home with your wife. You are at the crossway of 
the roads of life, my boy ; choose your way. 

“ But you have chosen already. You have gone to see your 
cousin of Beaus6ant, and you have had an inkling of luxury ; 
you have been to Madame de Restaud’s house, and in Father 
Goriot’s daughter you have seen a glimpse of the Parisienne 
for the first time. That day you came back with a word 
written upon your forehead. I knew it, I could read it — 
8 


114 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


‘ Success /’ Yes, success at any price. ‘Bravo,’ said I to 
myself, ‘ here is the sort of fellow for me.’ You wanted 
money. Where was it to come from ? You have drained 
your sisters’ little hoards (all brothers sponge more or less on 
their sisters). Those fifteen hundred francs of yours (got 
together, God knows how ! in a country where there are more 
chestnuts than five-franc pieces) will slip away like soldiers 
after pillage. And, then, what will you do? Shall you begin 
to work ? Work, or what you understand by work at this 
moment, means, for a man of Poiret’s calibre, an old age in 
Mamma Vauquer’s lodging-house. There are fifty thousand 
young men in your position at this moment, all bent as you 
are on solving one and the same problem — how to acquire a 
fortune rapidly. You are but a unit in that aggregate. You 
can guess, therefore, what efforts you must make, how desperate 
the struggle is. There are not fifty thousand good positions 
for you ; you must fight and devour one another like spiders 
in a pot. Do you know how a man makes his way here ? 
By brilliant genius or by skillful corruption. /You must either 
cut your way through these masses of men fike a cannon* 
ball or steal among them like a plague. Honesty is nothing 
to the purpose. Men bow before the power of genius ; they 
hate it, and try to slander it, because genius does not divide 
the spoil ; but if genius persists, they bow before it. To 
sum it all up in a phrase, if they fail to smother genius in the 
mud, they fall on their knees and worship it. Corruption is 
a great power in the world, and talent is scarce. So corruption 
is the weapon of superfluous mediocrity ; you will be made to 
feel the point of it everywhere. You will see women who 
spend more than ten thousand francs a year on dress, while 
their husband’s salary (his whole income) is but six thousand 
francs. You will see officials buying estates on twelve hundred 
francs a year. You will see women who sell themselves body 
and soul to drive in a carriage belonging to a son of a 
peer of France, who has a right to drive in the middle 


FATHER GORIOT. 


115 


rank at Longchamp. You have seen that poor simpleton of 
a Goriot obliged to meet a bill with his daughter’s name 
at the back of it, though her husband has fifty thousand 
francs a year. I defy you to walk a couple of yards any- 
where in Paris without stumbling on some infernal compli- 
cation. I’ll bet my head to a head of that salad that you 
will stir up a hornet’s nest by taking a fancy to the first 
young, rich, and pretty woman you meet. They are all 
dodging the law, all at loggerheads with their husbands. 
If I were to begin to tell you all that vanity or necessity 
(virtue is not often mixed up in it, you may be sure), all 
that vanity and necessity drive them to do for lovers, 
finery, housekeeping, or children, I should never come to an 
end. So an honest man is the common enemy. 

“ But do you know what an honest man is? Here, in Paris, 
an honest man is the man who keeps his own counsel, and 
will not divide the plunder. I am not speaking now of those 
poor bond-slaves who do the work of the world without a 
reward for their toil — God Almightyls outcasts, I call them. 
Among them, J[ grant you, is virtue in all the flower of its 
stupidity, but poverty is no less their portion. At this mo- 
ment, I think I see the long faces those good folk would pull 
if God played a practical joke on them and stayed away at 
the last judgment. 

“Well, then, if you mean to make a fortune quickly, you 
must either be rich to begin with, or make people believe that 
you are rich. It is no use playing here except for high stakes ; 
once take to low play, it is all up with you. If in the scores 
of professions that are open to you, there are ten men who 
rise very rapidly, people are sure to call them thieves. You 
can draw your own conclusions. Such is life. It is no 
cleaner than a kitchen; it reeks like a kitchen; and if you 
mean to cook your dinner, you must expect to soil your hands; 
the real art is in getting them clean again, and therein lies 
the whole morality of our epoch. If I take this tone in 


116 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


speaking of the world to you, I have the right to do so ; I 
know it well. Do you think that I am blaming it ? Far from 
it ; the world has always been as it is now. Moralists’ stric- 
tures will never change it. Mankind is not perfect, but one 
age is more or less hypocritical than another, and then simple- 
tons say that its morality is high or low. I do not think that 
the rich are any worse than the poor ; man is much the same, 
high or low, or wherever he is. In a million of these human 
cattle there may be half a score of bold spirits who rise above 
the rest, above the laws ; I am one of them. And you, if 
you are cleverer than -your fellows, make straight to your end, 
and hold your head high. But you must lay your account with 
envy and slander and mediocrity, and every man’s hand will 
be against you. Napoleon met with a minister of war, Aubry 
by name, who all but sent him to the colonies. 

** Feel your pulse. Think whether you can get up morning 
after morning, strengthened in yesterday’s purpose. In that 
case I will make you an offer that no one would decline. 
Listen attentively. You see, I have an idea of my own. My 
idea is to live a patriarchal life on a vast estate, say a hundred 
thousand acres, somewhere in the Southern States of America. 

I mean to be a planter, to have slaves, to make a few snug 
millions by selling my cattle, timber, and tobacco ; I want to 
live an absolute monarch, and to do just as I please ; to lead 
such a life as no one here in these squalid dens of lath and 
plaster ever imagines. I am a great poet; I do not write my 
poems, I feel them, and act them. At this moment I have 
fifty thousand francs, which might possibly buy forty negroes/ 
I want two hundred thousand francs, because I want to have 
two hundred negroes to carry out my notions of the patriarchal 
life properly. Negroes, you see, are like a sort of family 
ready grown, and there are no inquisitive public prosecutors 
out there to interfere with you. That investment in ebony 
ought to mean three or four million francs in ten years’ time. 
If I am successful, no one will ask me who I am. I shall be 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


117 


Mr. Four Millions, an American citizen. I shall be fifty years 
old by then, and sound and hearty still ; I shall enjoy life 
after my own fashion. In two words, if I find you an heiress 
with a million, will you give me two hundred thousand francs? 
Twenty per cent, commission, eh? Is that too much? Your 
little wife will be very much in love with you. Once married, 
you will show signs of uneasiness and remorse ; for a couple 
of weeks you will be depressed. Then, some night, after 
sundry grimacings, comes the confession, between two kisses, 
‘ Two hundred thousand francs of debts, my darling ! ’ This 
sort of farce is played every day in Paris, and by young men of 
the highest fashion. When a young wife has given her heart, she 
will not refuse her purse. Perhaps you are thinking that you 
will lose the money for good? Not you. You will make two 
hundred thousand francs again by some stroke of business. With 
your capital and your brains you should be able to accumulate 
as large a fortune as you could wish. Ergo , in six months you 
will have made your own fortune, and your old friend Vau- 
trin’s, and made an amiable woman very happy, to say noth- 
ing of your people at home, who must blow on their fingers 
to warm them, in the winter, for lack of firewood. You need 
not be surprised at my proposal, nor at the demand I make. 
Forty-seven out of every sixty great matches here in Paris are 
made after just such a bargain as this. The Chamber of 
Notaries compels my gentleman to ” 

‘ ‘ What must I do?” said Rastignac, eagerly interrupting 
Vautrin’s speech. 

“Next to nothing,” returned the other, with a slight in- 
voluntary movement, the suppressed exultation of the angler 
when he feels a bite at the end of his line. “ Follow me 
carefully ! The heart of a girl whose life is wretched and 
unhappy is a sponge that will thirstily absorb love ; a dry 
sponge that swells at the first drop of sentiment. If you pay 
court to a young girl whose existence is a compound of lone- 
liness, despair, and poverty, and who has no suspicion that 


118 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


she will come into a fortune, good Lord ! it is quint and 
quatorze at piquet ; it is knowing the numbers of the lottery 
. beforehand ; it is speculating in the funds when you have 
news from a sure source ; it is building up a marriage on an 
indestructible foundation. The girl may come in for millions, 
and she will fling them, as if they were so many pebbles, at 
your feet. ‘ Take it, my beloved ! Take it, Alfred, Adolphe, 
Eugene ! ’ or whoever it was that showed his sense by sacri- 
ficing himself for her. And as for sacrificing himself, this is 
how I understand it. You sell a coat that is getting shabby, 
so that you can take her to the Cadran bleu, treat her to 
mushrooms on toast, and then go to the Ambigu-Comique in 
the evening ; you pawn your watch to buy her a shawl. I 
need not remind you of the fiddle-faddle sentimentality that 
goes down so well with all women ; you spill a few drops of 
water on your stationery, for instance ; those are the tears 
you shed while far away from her. You look to me as if you 
were perfectly acquainted with the argot of the heart. Paris, 
you see, is like a forest in the New World, where you have to 
deal with a score of varieties of savages — Iroquois and Hurons — 
who live on the proceeds of their social hunting. You are a 
hunter of millions ; you set your snares ; you use lures and 
nets ; there are many ways of hunting. Some hunt heiresses, 
others a legacy ; some fish for souls, yet others sell their 
clients, bound hand and foot. Every one who comes back 
from the chase with his game-bag well filled meets with a 
warm welcome in good society. In justice to this hospitable 
part of the world, it must be said that you have to do with 
the most easy and good-natured of great cities. If the proud 
aristocracies of the rest of Europe refuse admittance among 
their ranks to a disreputable millionaire, Paris stretches out a 
hand to him, goes to his banquets, eats his dinners, and hob- 
nobs with his infamy.” 

“ But where is such a girl to be found? ” asked Eugene. 

“ Under your eyes ; she is yours already.” 


FATHER GO RIOT 


119 


“ Mile. Victorine?” 

“ Precisely.” 

“ And what was that you said ? M 

“ She is in love with you already, your little Baronne de 
Rastignac ! ” 

“ She has not a penny,” Eugene continued, much mysti- 
fied. 

“ Ah ! now we are coming to it ! Just another word or 
two, and it will all be clear enough. Her father, Taillefer, is 
an old scoundrel ; it is said that he murdered one of his 
friends at the time of the Revolution. He is one of your 
comedians that sets up to have opinions of his own. He is a 
banker — senior partner in the house of Frederic Taillefer and 
Company. He has one son, and means to leave all he has to 
the boy, to the prejudice of Victorine. For my part, I don’t 
like to see injustice of this sort. I am like Don Quixote, I 
have a fancy for defending the weak against the strong. If it 
should please God to take that youth away from him, Taillefer 
would only have his daughter left ; he would want to leave his 
money to some one or other ; an absurd notion, but it is only 
human nature, and he is not likely to have any more chil- 
dren, as I know. Victorine is gentle and amiable; she will 
soon twist her father round her fingers, and set his head spin- 
ning like a German top by plying him with sentiment ! She 
will be too much touched by your devotion to forget you ; 
you will marry her. I mean to play Providence for you, and 
Providence is to do my will. I have a friend whom I have 
attached closely to myself, a colonel in the Army of the Loire, 
who has just been transferred into the Royal Guard. He has 
taken my advice and turned ultra-royalist ; he is not one of 
those fools who never change their opinions. Of all pieces 
of advice, my cherub, I would give you this — don’t stick to 
your opinions any more than to yo,ur words. If any one asks 
you for them, let him have them — at a price. A man who 
prides himself on going in a straight line through life is an 

E 


120 


FATHER GO RIOT. 

, J 

idiot who believes in infallibility. There are no such things 
as principles ; there are only events, and there are no laws 
but those of expediency : a man of talent accepts events and 
the circumstances in which he finds himself, and turns every- 
thing to his own ends. If laws and principles were fixed and 
invariable, nations would not change them as readily as we 
change our shirts. The individual is not obliged to be more 
particular than the nation. A man whose services to France 
have been of the very slightest is a fetich looked on with 
superstitious awe because he has always seen everything in red ; 
but he is good, at the most, to be put into the Museum of 
Arts and Crafts, among the automatic machines, and labeled 
La Fayette ; while the prince at whom everybody flings a 
stone, the man who despises humanity so much that he spits 
as many oaths as he is asked for in the face of humanity, 
saved France from being torn in pieces at the Congress of 
Vienna; and they who should have given him laurels fling 
mud at him. Oh ! I know something of affairs, I can tell 
you ; I have the secrets of many men ! Enough. When I 
find three minds in agreement as to the application of a prin- 
ciple, I shall have a fixed and immovable opinion — I shall 
have to wait a long while first. In the Tribunals you will not 
find three judges of the same opinion on a single point of 
law. To return to the man I was telling you of. He would 
crucify Jesus Christ again, if I bade him. At a word from 
his old chum Vautrin he will pick a quarrel with a scamp that 
will not send so much as five francs to his sister, poor girl, 
and ” — (here Vautrin rose to his feet and stood like a fencing- 
master about to lunge) — “ turn him off into the dark !” he 
added. 

“How frightful!” said Eugene. “You do not really 
mean it ? M. Vautrin, you are joking ! I cannot believe 
that you are sincere in what your are saying.” 

“There! there! Keep cool!” said the other. “Don’t 
behave like a baby. But if you find any amusement in it, be 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


121 


indignant, flare up ! Say that I am a scoundrel, a rascal, a 
rogue, a bandit ; but do not call me a blackleg nor a spy ! 
There, out with it, fire away! I forgive you; it is quite 
natural at your age. I was like that myself once. Only re- 
member this, you will do worse things yourself some day. 
You will flirt with some pretty woman and take her money. 
You have thought of that, of course,” said Vautrin, “ for how 
are you to succeed unless love is laid under contribution ? 
There are no two ways about virtue, my dear student ; it 
either is or it is not. Talk of doing penance for your sins ! 
It is a nice system of business, when you pay for your crime 
by an act of contrition ! You seduce a woman that you may 
set your foot on such and such a rung of the social ladder ; 
you sow dissension among the children, of a family; you 
descend, in short, to every base action that can be committed 
at home or abroad to gain your own ends for your own 
pleasure or your profit ; and can you imagine that these are 
acts of faith, hope, or charity ? How is it that a dandy, who 
in a night has robbed a boy of half his fortune, gets only a 
couple of months in prison ; while a poor devil who steals a 
bank-note for a thousand francs, with aggravating circum- 
stances, is condemned to penal servitude? Those are your 
laws. Not a single provision but lands you in some absurdity. 
That man with yellow gloves and a golden tongue commits 
many a murder ; he sheds no blood, but he drains his victim’s 
veins as surely ; a desperado forces open a door with a crow- 
bar, dark deeds both of them ! You yourself will do every 
one of the things that I suggest to you to-day, bar the blood- 
shed. Do you believe that there is any absolute standard in 
this world ? Despise mankind and find out the meshes that 
you can slip through in the net of the Code. The secret of a 
great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime' 
that has never been found out, because it was properly 
executed.” 

“Silence, sir! I will not hear anymore; you make me 


122 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


doubt myself. At this moment my sentiments are all my 
science.” 

“ Just as you please, my fine fellow; I did not think you 
were so weak-minded,” said Vautrin, “I shall say no more 
about it. One last word, however” — and he looked hard 
at the student — “ you have my secret,” he said. 

“ A young man who refuses your offer knows that he must 
forget it.” 

“ Quite right, quite right ; I am glad to hear you say so. 
Somebody else might not be so scrupulous, you see. Keep 
in mind what I want to do for you. I will give you a 
fortnight. The offer is still open.” 

“ What a head of iron the man has ! ” said Eugene to him- 
self as he watched Vautrin walk unconcernedly away with his 
cane under his arm. “ Yet Mine, de Beauseant said as much 
more gracefully ; he has only stated the case in cruder lan- 
guage. He would tear my heart with claws of steel. What 
made me think of going to Mme. de Nucingen ? He guessed 
my motives before I knew them myself. To sum it up, that 
outlaw has told me more about virtue than all I have learned 
from men and books. If virtue admits of no compromises, I 
have certainly robbed my sisters,” he said, throwing down 
the bags on the table. 

He sat down again and fell, unconscious of his surround- 
ings, into deep thought. 

“ To be faithful to an ideal of virtue ! A heroic martyr- 
dom ! Pshaw ! every one believes in virtue, but who is 
virtuous? Nations have made an idol of liberty, but what 
nation on the face of the earth is free? My youth is still like 
a blue and cloudless sky. If I set myself to obtain wealth 
or power, does it not mean that I must make up my mind to 
lie, and fawn, and cringe, and swagger, and flatter, and dis- 
semble? To consent to be the servant of others who have 
likewise fawned, and lied, and flattered ? Must I cringe 
to them before I can hope to be their accomplice ? Well, 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


123 


then, I decline. I mean to work nobly and with a single 
heart. I will work day and night ; I will owe my fortune to 
nothing but my own exertions. It may be the slowest of all 
roads to success, but I shall lay my head on the pillow at 
night untroubled by evil thoughts. Is there a greater or a 
better thing than this — to look back over your life and know 
that it is stainless as a lily ! I and my life are like a young 
man and his betrothed. Vautrin has put before me all that 
comes after ten years of marriage. The devil ! my head is 
swimming. I do not want to think at all ; the heart is a sure 
guide.’' 

Eugene was roused from his musings by the voice of the 
stout Sylvie, who announced that the tailor had come, and 
Eugene therefore made his appearance before the man with 
the two money-bags, and was not ill pleased that it should be 
so. When he had tried on his dress suit, he put on his new 
morning costume, which completely metamorphosed him. 

“I am quite equal to M. de Trailles,” he said to himself. 
“ In short, I look like a gentleman.” 

“You asked me, sir, if I knew the houses where Mme. de 
Nucingen goes,” Father Goriot’s voice spoke from the door- 
way of Eugene’s room. 

“Yes.” 

“ Very well then, she is going to the Duchesse de Carigliano’s 
ball on Monday. If you can manage to be there, I shall 
hear from you whether my two girls enjoyed themselves, and 
how they were dressed, and all about it, in fact.” 

“ How did you find that out, my good Goriot? ” said Eu- 
gene, putting a chair by the fire for his visitor. 

“ Her maid told me. I hear all about their doings from 
Therese and Constance,” he added gleefully. 

The old man looked like a lover who is still young enough 
to be made happy by the discovery of some little stratagem 
which brings him information of his lady-love without her 
knowledge. 


124 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


“ You will see them both ! ” he said, giving artless expres- 
sion to a pang of jealousy. 

“I do not know,” answered Eugene. “I will go to Mme. 
de Beauseant and ask her to give me an introduction to the 
Duchesse.” 

Eugene felt a thrill of pleasure at the thought of appearing 
before the Vicomtesse, dressed as henceforward he always 
meant to be. The “ abysses of the human heart,” in the 
moralists’ phrase, are only insidious thoughts, involuntary 
promptings of personal interest. The instinct of enjoyment 
turns the scale ; those rapid changes of purpose which have 
furnished the text for so much rhetoric are calculations 
prompted by the hope of pleasure. Rastignac, beholding 
himself well dressed and impeccable as to gloves and boots, 
forgot his virtuous resolutions. Youth, moreover, when bent 
upon wrong-doing does not dare to behold itself in the mirror 
of consciousness ; mature age has seen itself ; and therein 
lies the whole difference between these two phases of life. 

A friendship between Eugene and his neighbor, Father 
Goriot, had been growing up for several days past. This 
secret friendship and the antipathy that the student had begun 
to entertain for Vautrin arose from the same psychological 
causes. The bold philosopher who shall investigate the effects 
of mental action upon the physical world will doubtless find 
more than one proof of the material nature of our sentiments 
in the relations which they create between human beings and 
other animals. What physiognomist is as quick to discern char- 
acter as a dog is to discover from a stranger’s face whether 
this is a friend or not ? Those by-words — “atoms,” “affini- 
ties” — are facts surviving in modern languages for the con- 
fusion of philosophic wiseacres who amuse themselves by 
winnowing the chaff of language to find its grammatical roots. 
We fed that we are loved. Our sentiments make themselves 
felt in everything, even at a great distance. A letter is a 
living soul, and so faithful an echo of the voice that speaks 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


125 


in it that finer natures look upon a letter as one of love’s 
most precious treasures. Father Goriot’s affection was of the 
instinctive order, a canine affection raised to a sublime pitch ; 
he had scented compassion in the air, and the kindly respect 
and youthful sympathy in the student’s heart. This friend- 
ship had, however, scarcely reached the stage at which confi- 
dences are made. Though Eugene had spoken of his wish 
to meet Mme. de Nucingen, it was not because he counted on 
the old man to introduce him to her house, for he hoped that 
his own audacity might stand him in good stead. All that 
Father Goriot had said as yet about his daughters had referred 
to the remarks that the student had made so freely in public 
on that day of the two visits. 

“ How could you think that Mme. de Restaud bore you a 
grudge for mentioning my name? ” he had said on the day 
following that scene at dinner. “ My daughters are very fond 
of me ; I am a happy father ; but my sons-in-law have be- 
haved badly to me, and rather than make trouble between my 
darlings and their husbands, I choose to see my daughters 
secretly. Fathers who can see their daughters at any time 
have no idea of all the pleasure that this mystery gives me ; 
I cannot always see mine when I wish, do you understand? 
So when it is fine I walk out in the Champs-filysees, after 
finding out from their waiting-maids whether my daughters 
mean to go out. I wait near the entrance; my heart beats 
fast when the carriages begin to come ; I admire them in their 
dresses, and as they pass they give me a little smile, and it 
seems that everything was lighted up for me by a ray of bright 
sunlight. I wait, for they always go back the same way, and 
then I see them again ; the fresh air has done them good and 
brought color into their cheeks ; all about me people say, 
‘ What a beautiful woman that is ! ’ and it does my heart good 
to hear them. 

“Are they not my own flesh and blood? I love the very 
horses that draw them ; I envy the little lap-dog on their 


126 


FATHER GORIOT. 


knees. Their happiness is my life. Every one loves after his 
own fashion, and mine does no one any harm ; why should 
people trouble their heads about me? I am happy in my own 
way. Is there any law against my going to see my girls in 
the evening when they are going out to a ball ? And what a 
disappointment it is when I get there too late, and am told 
that ‘ madame has gone out ! ’ Once I waited till three 
o’clock in the morning for Nasie; I had not seen her for two 
whole days. I was so pleased that it was almost too much for 
me ! Please do not speak of me unless it is to say how good 
my daughters are to me. They are always wanting to heap 
presents upon me, but I will not have it. ‘ Just keep your 
money,’ I tell them. ‘What should I do with it? I want 
nothing.’ And what ami, sir, after all? An old carcass, 
whose soul is always where my daughters are. When you 
have seen Mme. de Nucingen, tell me which you like the 
most,” said the old man after a moment’s pause, while Eugene 
put the last touches to his toilet. The student was about to 
go out to walk in the Garden of the Tuileries until the hour 
when he could venture to appear in Mme. de Beauseant’s 
drawing-room. 

That walk was a turning-point in Eugene’s career. Several 
women noticed him ; he looked so handsome, so young, and 
so well dressed. This almost admiring attention gave a new 
turn to his thoughts. He forgot his sisters and the aunt who 
had robbed herself for him ; he no longer remembered his 
own virtuous scruples. He had seen hovering above his head 
the fiend so easy to mistake for an angel, the devil with rainbow 
wings, who scatters rubies, and aims his golden shafts at palace 
fronts, who invests women with purple, and thrones with a 
glory that dazzles the eyes of fools till they forget the simple 
origins of royal dominion ; he had heard the rustle of that 
vanity whose tinsel seems to us to be the symbol of power. 
However cynical Vautrin’s words had been, they had made an 
impression on his mind, as the sordid features of the old crone 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


127 


who whispers, “ A lover, and gold in torrents, ” remain 
engraven on a young girl’s memory. 

Eugene lounged about the walks till it was nearly five 
o’clock, then he went to Mme. de Beauseant’s, and received 
one of the terrible blows against which young hearts are 
defenseless. Hitherto the Vicomtesse had received him with 
the kindly urbanity, the bland grace of manner that is the 
result of fine breeding, but is only complete when it comes 
from the heart. 

To-day Mme. de Beauseant bowed constrainedly, and spoke 
curtly — 

“ M. de Rastignac, I cannot possibly see you, at least not 
at this moment. I am engaged ” 

An observer, and Rastignac instantly became an observer, 
could read the whole history, the character and customs of 
caste, in the phrase, in the tones of her voice, in her glance 
and bearing. He caught a glimpse of the iron hand beneath 
the velvet glove — the personality, the egoism beneath the 
manner, the wood beneath the varnish. In short, he heard 
that unmistakable I the King that issues from the plumed 
canopy of the throne, and finds its last echo under the crest 
of the simplest gentleman. 

Eugene had trusted too implicitly to the generosity of a 
woman ; he could not believe in her haughtiness. Like all 
the unfortunate, he had subscribed, in all good faith, the gen- 
erous compact which should bind the benefactor to the recip- 
ient, and the first article in that bond, between two large- 
hearted natures, is a perfect equality. The kindness which 
knits two souls together is as rare, as divine, and as little 
understood as the passion of love, for both love and kindness 
are the lavish generosity of noble natures. Rastignac was 
set upon going to the Duchesse de Carigliano’s ball, so he 
meekly swallowed down this rebuff, and concealed any mani- 
festation of his disappointment. 

“ Madame,” he faltered out, “1 would not have come to 


128 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


trouble you about a trifling matter ; be so kind as to permit 
me to see you later, I can wait.” 

“Very well, come and dine with me,” she said, a little 
confused by the harsh way in which she had spoken, for this 
lady was as genuinely kind-hearted as she was high-born. 

Eugene was touched by this sudden relenting, but none the 
less he said to himself as he went away, “ Crawl in the dust, 
put up with every kind of treatment. What must the rest of 
the world be like when one of the kindest of women forgets 
all her promises of befriending me in a moment, and tosses 
me aside like an old shoe? So it is every one for himself? 
It is true that her house is not a shop, and I have put myself 
in the wrong by needing her help. You' should cut your way 
through the world like a cannon-ball, as Vautrin said.” 

But the student’s bitter thoughts were soon dissipated by 
the pleasure which he promised himself in this dinner with 
the Vicomtesse. Fate seemed to determine that the smallest 
accidents in his life should combine to urge him into a career, 
which the terrible sphinx of the Maison Vauquer had described 
as a field of battle where you must either slay or be slain, and 
cheat to avoid being cheated. You leave your conscience 
and your heart at the barriers, and wear a mask on entering 
into this game of grim earnest, where, as in ancient Sparta, 
you must snatch your prize without being detected if you 
would deserve the crown. 

On his return he found the Vicomtesse gracious and kindly, 
as she had always been to him. They went together to the 
dining-room, where the Vicomte was waiting for his wife. In 
the time of the Restoration the luxury of the table was car- 
ried, as is well known, to the highest degree, and M. de 
Beauseant, like many jaded men of the world, had few plea- 
sures left but those of good-cheer ; in this matter, in fact, he 
was a gourmand of the schools of Louis XVIII. and of the 
Due d’Escars, and luxury was supplemented by splendor. 
Eugene dining for the first time in a house where the tradi- 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


129 


tions of grandeur had descended through many generations, 
had never seen any spectacle like this that at this time met 
his eyes. 

In the time of the Empire, balls had always ended with a 
supper, because the officers who took part in them must be 
fortified for immediate service, and even in Paris might be 
called upon to leave the ballroom for the battlefield. This 
arrangement had gone out of fashion under the Monarchy, 
and Eugene had so far only been asked to dances. The self- 
possession which pre-eminently distinguished him in later life 
already stood him in good stead, and he did not betray his 
amazement. Yet as he saw for the first time the finely 
wrought silver-plate, the completeness of every detail, the 
sumptuous dinner, noiselessly served, it was difficult for such 
an ardent imagination not to prefer this life of studied and 
refined luxury to the hardships of the life which he had 
chosen only that morning. 

His thoughts went back for a moment to the lodging-house, 
and, with a feeling of profound loathing, he vowed to himself 
that at New Year he would go; prompted at. least as much 
by a desire to live among cleaner surroundings as by a wish 
to shake off Vautrin, whose huge hand he seemed to feel on 
his shoulder at that moment. When you consider the num- 
berless forms, clamorous or mute, that corruption takes in 
Paris, common-sense begins to wonder what mental aberra- 
tion prompted the state to establish great colleges and schools 
there, and assemble young men in the capital ; how it is that 
pretty women are respected, or that the gold coin displayed 
in the money-changer’s wooden saucers does not take to itself 
wings in the twinkling of an eye ; and when you come to 
think further, how comparatively few cases of crime there are, 
and to count up the misdemeanors committed by youth, is 
. there not a certain amount of respect due to these patient 
Tantaluses who wrestle with themselves and nearly always 
come off victorious ? The struggles of the poor student in 
9 


130 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


Paris, if skillfully drawn, would furnish a most dramatic pic- 
ture of modern civilization. 

In vain Mme. de Beauseant looked at Eugene as if asking 
him to speak; the student was tongue-tied in the Vicomte’s 
presence. 

“Are you going to take me to the Italiens this evening ?” 
the Vicomtesse asked her husband. 

“You cannot doubt that I should obey you with pleasure,” 
he answered, and there was a sarcastic tinge in his politeness 
which Eugene did not detect, “ but I ought to go to meet 
some one at the Varietes.” 

“ His mistress,” said she to herself. 

“Then is not Ajuda coming for you this evening?” in- 
quired the Vicomte. 

“No,” she answered, petulantly. 

“ Very well, then, if you really must have an arm, take 
that of M. de Rastignac.” 

The Vicomtesse turned to Eugene with a smile. 

“ That would be a very compromising step for you,” she 
said. 

“‘A Frenchman loves danger, because in danger there is 
glory,’ to quote M. de Chateaubriand,” said Rastignac, with 
a bow. 

A few moments later he was sitting beside Mme. de Beau- 
seant in a brougham, that whirled them through the streets of 
Paris to a fashionable theatre. It seemed to him that some 
fairy magic had suddenly transported him into a box facing 
the stage. All the lorgnettes of the house were pointed at 
him as he entered, and at the Vicomtesse in her charming 
toilet. He went from enchantment to enchantment. 

“You must talk to me, you know,” said Mme. de Beau- 
seant. “ Ah ! look ! There is Mme. de Nucingen in the 
third box from ours. Her sister and M. de Trailles are on 
the other side.” 

The Vicomtesse glanced as she spoke at the box where 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


131 


Mile, de Rochefide should have been ; M. d’Ajuda was not 
there, and Mme. de Beauseant’s face lighted up in a marvel- 
ous way. 

“ She is charming,’’ said Eugene, after looking at Mme. de 
Nucingen. 

“ She has white eyelashes.” 

“ Yes, but she has such a pretty slender figure ! ” 

“ Her hands are large.” 

“ Such beautiful eyes ! ” 

“ Her face is long.” 

“Yes, but length gives distinction. ” 

“It is lucky for her that she has some distinction in her 
face. Just see how she fidgets with her opera-glass ! The 
Goriot blood shows itself in every movement,” said the 
Vicomtesse, much to Eugene’s astonishment. 

Indeed, Mme. de Beauseant seemed to be engaged in mak- 
ing a survey of the house, and to be unconscious of Mme. 
Nucingen’s existence ; but no movement made by the latter 
was lost upon the Vicomtesse. The house was full of the 
loveliest women in Paris, so that Delphine de Nucingen was 
not a little flattered to receive the undivided attention of 
Mme. de Beauseant’s young, handsome, and well-dressed 
cousin, who seemed to have no eyes for any one else. 

“ If you look at her so persistently, you will make people 
talk, M. de Rastignac. You will never succeed if you fling 
yourself at any one’s head like that.” 

“My dear cousin,” said Eugene, “you have protected me 
indeed so far, and now if you would complete your work, I 
only ask of you a favor which will cost you but little, and be 
of very great service to me. I have lost my heart.” 

“ Already ! ” 

“Yes.” 

“ And to that woman ! ” 

“ How could I aspire to find any one else to listen tome?” 
he asked, with a keen glance at his cousin. “ Her grace the 


132 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


Duchesse de Carigliano is a friend of the Duchesse de Berri,” 
he went on, after a pause ; “ you are sure to see her, will you 
be so kind as to present me to her, and to take me with you 
to her ball on Monday ? I shall meet Mme. de Nucingen 
there, and enter upon my first skirmish.” 

“ Willingly,” she said. “If you have a liking for her 
already, your affairs of the heart are likely to prosper. That is 
de Marsay over there in the Princesse Galathionne’s box. 
Mme. de Nucingen is racked with jealousy. There is no 
better time for approaching a woman, especially if she hap- 
pens to be a banker’s wife. All those ladies of the Chausee- 
d’Antin love revenge.” 

“ Then what would you do yourself in such a case ? ” 

“I should suffer in silence.” 

At this point the Marquis d’Ajuda appeared in Mme. de 
Beauseant’s box. 

“ I have made a muddle of my affairs to come to you,” he 
said, “ and I am telling you about it, so that it may not be a 
sacrifice.” 

Eugene saw the glow of joy on the Vicomtesse’s face, and 
knew that this was love, and learned the difference between 
love and the affectations of Parisian coquetry. He admired 
his cousin, grew mute, and yielded his place to M. d’Ajuda 
with a sigh. 

“ How noble, how sublime a woman is when she loves like 
that ! ” he said to himself. “ And he could forsake her for a 
doll ! Oh ! how could any one forsake her ? ” 

There was a boy’s passionate indignation in his heart. He 
could have flung himself at Mme. de Beauseant’s feet ; he 
longed for the power of the devil if he could snatch her 
away and hide her in his heart, as an eagle snatches up some 
white yeanling from the plains and bears it to his eyrie. It 
was humiliating to him to think that in all this gallery of fair 
pictures he had not one picture of his own. “ To have a 
mistress and an almost royal position is a sign of power,” he 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


133 


said to himself. And he looked at Mme. de Nucingen as a 
man measures another who has insulted him. 

The Vicomtesse turned to him, and the expression of her 
eyes thanked him a thousand times for his discretion. The 
first act came to an end just then. 

“ Do you know Mme. de Nucingen well enough to present 
M. de Rastignac to her?” she asked of the Marquis d’Ajuda. 

“ She will be delighted,” said the Marquis. The handsome 
Portuguese rose as he spoke and took the student’s arm, 
and in another moment Eugene found himself in Mme. de 
Nucingen’s box. 

“Madame,” said the Marquis, “I have the honor of pre- 
senting to you the Chevalier Eugene de Rastignac ; he is a 
cousin of Mme. de Beauseant’s. You have made so deep an 
impression upon him, that I thought I would fill up the 
measure of his happiness by bringing him nearer to his 
divinity.” 

Words spoken half-jestingly to cover their somewhat dis- 
respectful import ; but such an implication, if carefully 
disguised, never gives offense to a woman. Mme. de Nucin- 
gen smiled, and offered Eugene the place which her husband 
had just left. 

“ I do not venture to suggest that you should stay with 
me, monsieur,” she said. “ Those who are so fortunate as 
to be in Mme. de Beaus6ant’s company seldom desire to soon 
leave it.” 

“Madame,” Eugene said, lowering his voice, “I think 
that to please my cousin I should remain with you. Before 
my Lord Marquis came we were speaking of you and of your 
exceedingly distinguished appearance,” he added aloud. 

M. d’Ajuda turned and left them. 

“Are you really going to stay with me, monsieur?” asked 
the Baroness. “ Then we shall make each other’s acquaint- 
ance. Mme. de Restaud told me about you, and has made 
me anxious to meet you.” 


134 


FATHER G OR 10 T. 


“ She must be very insincere, then, for she has shut her 
door on me.” 

“ What? ” 

“ Madame, I will tell you honestly the reason why ; but I 
must crave your indulgence before confiding such a secret to 
you. I am your father’s neighbor ; I had no idea that Mine, 
de Restaud was his daughter. I was rash enough to mention 
his name ; I meant no harm, but I annoyed your sister and 
her husband very much. You cannot think how severely the 
Duchesse de Langeais and my cousin blamed this apostasy on 
a daughter’s part, as a piece of bad taste. I told them all 
about it, and they both burst out laughing. Then Mine, de 
Beauseant made some comparison between you and your sister, 
speaking in high terms of you, and saying how very fond you 
were of my neighbor, M. Goriot. And, indeed, how could 
you help loving him ? He adores you so passionately that I 
am jealous already. We talked about you this morning for 
two hours. So this evening I was quite full of all that your 
father had told me, and while I was dining with my cousin I 
said that you could not be as beautiful as affectionate. Mme. 
de Beauseant meant to gratify such warm admiration, I think, 
when she brought me here, telling, ne, in her gracious way, 
that I should see you.” 

“Then, even now, I owe you a debt of gratitude, mon- 
sieur,” said the banker’s wife. “ We shall be quite old friends 
in a little while.” 

“ Although a friendship with you could only be like an ordi- 
nary friendship,” said Rastignac; “I should ever wish to be 
your friend.” 

Such stereotyped phrases as these, in the mouths of begin- 
ners, possess an unfailing charm for women, and are insipid 
only when read coldly ; for a young man’s tone, glance, and 
attitude give a surpassing eloquence to the banal phrases. 
Mme. de Nucingen thought that Rastignac was adorable. 
Then, woman-like, being at a loss how to reply to the 


FATHER G OR 10 T. 


135 


student’s outspoken admiration, she answered a previous re- 
mark. 

“ Yes, it is very wrong of my sister to treat our poor father 
as she does,” she said ; “he has been a providence to us. It 
was not until M. de Nucingen positively ordered me only to 
receive him in the mornings that I yielded the point. But I 
have been unhappy about it for a long while ; I have shed 
many tears over it. This violence to my feelings, with my 
husband’s brutal treatment, have been the two causes of my 
unhappy married life. There is certainly no woman in Paris 
whose lot seems more enviable than mine, and yet, in 
reality, there is not one so much to be pitied. You will think 
I must be out of my senses to talk to you like this; but you 
know my father, and I cannot very well regard you as a 
stranger.” 

“You will find no one,” said Eugene, “who longs as 
eagerly as I do to be yours. What do all women seek? 
Happiness.” (He answered his own question in low, vibrating 
tones.) “And if happiness for a woman means that she is to 
be loved and adored, to have a friend to whom she can pour 
out her wishes, her fancies, her sorrows and joys ; to whom she 
can lay bare her heart an* 4 al, and all her fair defects and her 
gracious virtues, without tear of a betrayal ; believe me, the 
devotion and the warmth that never fail can only be found 
in the heart of a young man who, at a bare sign from you, 
would go to his death, who neither knows nor cares to know 
anything as yet of the world, because you will be all the 
world to him. I myself, you see (you will laugh at my 
simplicity), have just come from a remote country district ; I 
am quite new to this world of Paris ; I have only known true 
and loving hearts ; and I made up my mind that here I should 
find no love. Then I chanced to meet my cousin, and to 
see my cousin’s heart from very near ; I have divined the in- 
exhaustible treasures of passion, and, like Cherubino, I am 
the lover of all women, until the day comes when I find 


136 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


the woman to whom I may devote nfyself. As soon as I 
saw you, as soon as I came into the theatre this evening, 
I felt myself borne towards you as if by the current of a 
stream. I had so often thought of you already, but I had 
never dreamed that you would be so beautiful ! Mme. de 
Beaus6ant told me that I must not look so much at you. 
She does not know the charm of your red lips, your fair 

face, nor see how soft your eyes are I also am beginning 

to talk nonsense; but let me talk.” 

Nothing pleases women better than to listen to such whis- 
pered words as these ; the most puritanical among them 
listens even when she ought not to reply to them ; and Ras- 
tignac, having once begun, continued to pour out his story, 
dropping his voice, that she might lean and listen ; and Mme. 
de Nucingen, smiling, glanced from time to time at de Marsay, 
who still sat in the Princesse Galathionne’s box. 

Rastignac did not leave Mme. de Nucingen till her husband 
came to take her home. 

“Madame,” Eugene said, “I shall have the pleasure of 
calling upon you before the Duchesse de Carigliano’s ball.” 

“If matame infites you to come,” said the Baron, a thick- 
set Alsatian, with indications of a sinister cunning in his 
full-moon countenance, “you are quide sure of being well 
receifed.” 

“ My affairs seem to be in a promising way,” said Eugene 
to himself. “ ‘ Can you love me? ’ I asked her, and she did 
not resent it. The bit is in the horse’s mouth, and I have 
only to mount and ride ; ” and with that he went to pay his 
respects to Mme. de Beauseant, who was leaving the theatre 
on d’Ajuda’s arm. 

The student did not know that the Baroness’ thoughts had 
been wandering ; that she was even then expecting a letter 
from de Marsay, one of those letters that bring about a rup- 
ture that rends the soul ; so, happy in his delusion, Eugene 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


137 


went with the Vicomtesse to the peristyle, where people were 
waiting till their carriages were announced. 

“ That cousin of yours is hardly recognizable for the same 
man,” said the Portuguese laughingly to the Vicomtesse, 
when Eugene had taken leave of them. “ He will break the 
bank. He is as supple as an eel ; he will go a long way, of 
that I am sure. Who else could have picked out a woman 
for him, as you did, just when she needed consolation?” 

“ But it is not certain that she does not still love the faith- 
less lover,” said Mme. de Beaus6ant. 

The student meanwhile walked back from the Th&itre- 
Italien to the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve, making the most 
delightful plans as he went. He had noticed how closely 
Mme. de Restaud had scrutinized him when he appeared in 
the Vicomtesse’s box, and again when he sat beside Mme. de 
Nucingen, and inferred that the Countess’ doors would not 
be closed in future. Four important houses were now open 
to him — for he meant to stand well with the Duchesse ; he 
had four supporters in the inmost circle of society in Paris. 
Even now it was clear to him that, once involved in this in- 
tricate social machinery, he must attach himself to a spoke of 
the wheel that was to turn and raise his fortunes ; he would 
not examine himself too curiously as to the methods, but he 
was certain of the end, and conscious of the power to gain 
and keep his hold. 

“ If Mme. de Nucingen takes an interest in me, I will teach 
her how to manage her husband. That husband of hers is a 
great speculator ; he might put me in the way of making a 
fortune by a single stroke.” 

He did not say this bluntly in so many words ; as yet, in- 
deed, he was not sufficient of a diplomatist to sum up a situa- 
tion, to see its possibilities at a glance, and calculate the 
chances in his favor. These were nothing but hazy ideas that 
floated over his mental horizon ; they were less cynical than 
Vautrin’s notions ; but if they had been tried in the crucible 


138 


FATHER GO RIO T. 


of conscience, no very pure result would have issued from 
the test. It is by a succession of such like transactions that 
men sink at last to the level of the relaxed morality of this 
epoch, when there have never been so few of those who square 
their courses with their theories, so few of those noble charac- 
ters who do not yield to temptation, for whom the slightest 
deviation from the line of rectitude is a crime. To these mag- 
nificent types of uncompromising right we owe two master- 
pieces — the Alceste of Moliere, and, in our own day, the 
characters of Jeanie Deans and her father in Sir Walter Scott’s 
novel. Perhaps a work which should chronicle the opposite 
course, which should trace out all the devious courses through 
which a man of the world, a man of ambitions, drags his con- 
science, just steering clear of crime that he may gain his end 
and yet save appearances, such a chronicle would be no less 
edifying and no less dramatic. 

Rastignac went home. He was fascinated by Mme. de 
Nucingen ; he seemed to see her before him, slender and 
graceful as a swallow. He recalled the intoxicating sweetness 
of her eyes, her fair hair, the delicate silken tissue of the skin, 
beneath which it almost seemed to him that he could see the 
blood coursing ; the tones of her voice still exerted a spell 
over him ; he had forgotten nothing ; his walk perhaps heated 
his imagination by sending a glow of warmth through his 
veins. He knocked unceremoniously at Goriot’s door. 

“ I have seen Mme. Delphine, neighbor,” said he. 

“ Where?” 

“ At the Italiens.” 

“Did she enjoy it ? Just come inside,” and the old 

man left his bed, unlocked the door, and promptly returned 
again. 

It was the first time that Eugene had been in Father Goriot’s 
room, and he could not control his feeling of amazement at 
the contrast between the den in which the father lived and 
the costume of the daughter whom he had iust beheld. The 


FATHER GORIOT. 


139 


window was curtainless, the walls were damp, in places the 
varnished wall-paper had come away and gave glimpses of the 
grimy yellow plaster beneath. The wretched bed on which 
the old man lay boasted but one thin blanket, and a wadded 
quilt made out of large pieces of Mme. Vauquer’s old dresses. 
The floor was damp and gritty. Opposite the window stood 
a chest of drawers made of rosewood, one of the old-fashioned 
kind with a curving front and brass handles, shaped like rings 
of twisted vine stems covered with flowers and leaves. On a 
venerable piece of furniture with a wooden shelf stood an ewer 
and basin and shaving apparatus. A pair of shoes stood in 
one corner ; a night-table by the bed had neither a door nor 
marble slab. There was not a trace of a fire in the empty 
grate ; the square walnut table with the cross-bar against 
which Father Goriot had crushed and twisted his posset-dish 
stood near the hearth. The old man’s hat was lying on a 
broken-down bureau. An arm-chair stuffed with straw and 
a couple of chairs completed the list of ramshackle furniture. 
From the tester of the bed, tied to the ceiling by a piece of 
rag, hung a strip of some cheap material in large red and 
black checks. No poor drudge in a garret could be worse 
lodged than Father Goriot in Mme. Vauquer’s lodging-house. 
The mere sight of the room sent a chill through you and a 
sense of oppression ; it was like the worst cell in a prison. 
Luckily, Goriot could not see the effect that his surroundings 
produced on Eugene as the latter deposited his candle on the 
night-table. The old man turned round, keeping the bed- 
clothes huddled up to his chin. 

“Well,” he said, “and which do you like the best, Mme. 
de Restaud or Mme. de Nucingen ? ” 

“ I like Mme. Delphine the best,” said the law student, 
“ because she loves you the best.” 

At the words so heartily spoken the old man’s hand slipped 
out from under the bedclothes and eagerly grasped that of 
Eugene. 


140 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


“ Thank you, thank you,” he said, gratefully. “Then 
what did she say about me ? ” 

The student repeated the Baroness’ remarks with some em- 
bellishments of his own, the old man listening the while as 
though he heard a voice from heaven. 

“ Dear child ! ” he said. “ Yes, yes, she is very fond of 
me. But you must not believe all that she tells you about 
Anastasie. The two sisters are jealous of each other, you see, 
another proof of their affection. Mme. de Restaud is very 
fond of me too. I know she is. A father sees his children 
as God sees all of us ; he looks into the very depths of their 
hearts ; he knows their intentions ; and both of them are so 
loving. Oh ! if I only had good sons-in-law, I should be too 
happy, and I dare say there is no perfect happiness here below. 
If I might live with them — simply hear their voices, know 
that they are there, see them go and come as I used to do at 
home when they were still with me ; why, my heart bounds at 
the thought Were they nicely dressed?” 

“Yes,” said Eugene. “But, M. Goriot, how is it that 
your daughters have such fine houses, while you live in such a 
den as this ? ’ ’ 

“Dear me, why should I want anything better?” he re- 
plied, with seeming carelessness. “ I can’t quite explain to 
you how it is ; I am not used to stringing words together 
properly, but it all lies there ” he said, tapping his heart. 

“ My real life is in my two girls, you see ; and so long as 
they are happy and smartly dressed, and have soft carpets 
under their feet, what does it matter what clothes I wear or 
where I lie down of a night ? I shall never feel cold so long 
as they are warm ; I shall never feel dull if they are laughing. 
I have no troubles but theirs. When you, too, are a father, 
and you hear your children’s little voices, you will say to 
yourself, ‘That has all come from me.’ You will feel that 
those little ones are akin to every drop in your veins, that they 
are the very flower of your life (and what else are they?); 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


141 


you will cleave so closely to them that you seem to feel every 
movement that they make. Everywhere I hear their voices 
sounding in my ears. If they are sad, the look in their eyes 
freezes my blood. Some day you will find out that there is 
far more happiness in another’s happiness than in your own. 
It is something that I cannot explain, something within that 
sends a glow of warmth all through you. In short, I live my 
life three times over. Shall I tell you something funny ? 
Well, then, since I have been a father, I have come to under- 
stand God. He is everywhere in the world, because the 
whole world comes from Him. And it is just the same with, 
my children, monsieur. Only, I love my daughters better 
than God loves the world, for the world is not so beautiful as 
God Himself is, but my children are more beautiful than I 
am. Their lives are so bound up with mine that I felt some- 
how that you would see them this evening ! Great heaven ! 
If any man would make my little Delphine as happy as a wife 
is when she is loved, I would black his boots and run on his 
errands. That miserable M. de Marsay is a cur ; I know all 
about him from her maid. A longing towring his neck comes 
over me now and then. He does not love her ! does not love 
a pearl of a woman, with a voice like a nightingale and 
shaped like a model. Where can her eyes have been when 
she married that great lump of an Alsatian ? They ought 
both of them to have married young men, good-looking and 
good-tempered — but, after all, they had their own way.” 

Father Goriot was sublime. Eugene had never yet seen his 
face light up as it did now with the passionate fervor of a 
father’s love. It is worthy of remark that strong feeling has 
a very subtle and pervasive power ; the roughest nature, in the 
endeavor to express a deep and sincere affection, communi- 
cates to others the influence that has put resonance into the 
voice, and eloquence into every gesture, wrought a change in 
the very features of the speaker ; for under the inspiration of 
passion the stupidest human being attains to the highest 


142 


FATHER GO RIOT 


eloquence of ideas, if not of language, and seems to move in 
some sphere of light. In the old man’s tones and gesture 
there was something just then of the same spell that a great 
actor exerts over his audience. But does not the poet in us 
find expression in our affections ? 

“Well,” said Eugene, “perhaps you will not be sorry to 
hear that she is pretty sure to break with de Marsay before 
long. That sprig of fashion has left her for the Princesse 
Galathionne. For my own part, I fell in love with Mme. 
Delphine this evening. ” ' 

“Stuff! ” said Father Goriot. 

“ I did, indeed ; and she did not regard me with aversion. 
For a whole hour we talked of love, and I am to go to call on 
her on Saturday, the day after to-morrow.” 

“ Oh ! how I should love you, if she should like you. You 
are kind-hearted ; you would never make her miserable. If 
you were to forsake her, I would cut your throat at once. A 
woman does not love twice, you see ! Good heavens ! what 
nonsense I am talking, M. Eugene ! It is cold ; you ought 
not to stay here. Mon Dieu ! so you have heard her speak ? 
What message did she give you for me ? ’ ’ 

“ None at all,” said Eugene to himself ; aloud he answered, 
“ She told me to tell you that your daughter sends you a good 
kiss.” 

“ Good-night, neighbor ! Sleep well, and pleasant dreams 
to you ! I have mine already made for me by that message 
from her. May God grant you all your desires ! You have 
come in like a good angel on me to-night, and brought with 
you the air that my daughter breathes.” 

“ Poor old fellow ! ” said Eugene as he lay down. “ It is 
enough to melt a heart of stone. His daughter no more 
thought of him than of the Grand Turk.” 


Ever after this conference Goriot looked upon his neighbor 
as a friend, a confidant such as he had never hoped to find ; 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


143 


and there was established between the two the only relation- 
ship that could attach this old man to another man. The 
passions never miscalculate. Father Goriot felt that this 
friendship brought him closer to his daughter Delphine ; he 
thought that he should find a warmer welcome for himself 
if the Baroness should care for Eugene. Moreover, he had 
confided one of his troubles to the younger man. Mme. 
de Nucingen, for whose happiness he prayed a thousand times 
daily, had never known the joys of love. Engine was cer- 
tainly (to make use of his own expression) one of the nicest 
young men that he had ever seen, and some prophetic 
instinct seemed to tell him that Eugene was to give her the 
happiness which had not been hers. These were the begin- 
nings of a friendship that grew up between the old man and 
his neighbor ; but for this friendship the catastrophe of the 
drama must have remained a mystery. 

The affection with which Father Goriot regarded Eugene, 
by whom he seated himself at breakfast, the change in 
Goriot's face, which, as a rule, looked as expressionless as a 
plaster cast, and a few words that passed between the two, 
surprised the other lodgers. Vautrin, who saw Eugene for 
the first time since their interview, seemed as if he would 
fain read the student’s very soul. During the night Eugene 
had had some time in which to scan the vast field that lay 
before him ; and now, as he remembered yesterday’s proposal, 
the thought of Mile. Taillefer’s dowry came, of course, to his 
mind, and he could not help thinking of Victorine as the 
most exemplary youth may think of an heiress. It chanced 
that their eyes met. The poor girl did not fail to see that 
Eugene looked very handsome in his new clothes. So much 
was said in the glance thus exchanged, that Eugene could 
not doubt but that he was associated in her mind with the 
vague hopes that lie dormant in a girl’s heart and gather round 
the first attractive new-comer. “ Eight hundred thousand 
francs!” a voice cried in his ears, but suddenly he took 


144 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


refuge in the memories of yesterday evening, thinking that his 
extemporized passion for Mme. de Nucingen was a talisman 
that would preserve him from this temptation. 

“They gave Rossini’s 4 Barber of Seville’ at the Italiens 
yesterday evening,” he remarked. 44 I never heard such de- 
licious music. Good gracious ! how lucky people are to have 
a box at the Italiens ! ” 

Father Goriot drank in every word that Eugene let fall, 
and watched him as a dog watches his master’s slightest move- 
ment. 

“You men are like fighting-cocks,” said Mme. Vauquer; 
44 you do what you like.” 

44 How did you get back?” inquired Vautrin. 

44 1 walked,” answered Eugene. 

44 For my own part,” remarked the tempter, 44 1 do not care 
about doing things by halves. If I want to enjoy myself that 
way, I should prefer to go in my carriage, sit in my own box, 
and do the thing comfortably. Everything or nothing; that 
is my motto.” 

44 And a good one too,” commented Mme. Vauquer. 

44 Perhaps you will see Mme. de Nucingen to-day,” said 
Eugene, addressing Goriot in an undertone. 44 She will wel- 
come you with open arms, I am sure ; she would want to ask 
you for all sorts of little details about me. I have found out 
that she would do anything in the world to be known by my 
cousin Mme. de Beauseant ; don’t forget to tell her that I love 
her too well not to think of trying to arrange this.” 

Rastignac went at once to the Ecole de droit. He had no 
mind to stay a moment longer than was necessary in that 
odious house. He wasted his time that day ; he had fallen a 
victim to that fever of the brain that accompanies the too 
vivid hopes of youth. Vautrin’s arguments had set him 
meditating on social life, and he was deep in these reflections 
when he happened on his friend Bianchon in the Jardin du 
Luxembourg. 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


145 


“ What makes you look so solemn ? ” said the medical stu- 
dent, putting an arm through Eugene’s as they went towards 
the Palais. 

“ I am tormented by temptations.” 

“ What kind? There is a cure for temptation.” 

“ What?” 

“ Yielding to it.” 

“ You laugh, but you don’t know what it is all about. Have 
you read Rousseau ? ’ ’ 

“ Yes.” 

“ Do you remember that he asks the reader somewhere what 
he would do if he could make a fortune by killing an old 
mandarin somewhere in China by mere force of wishing it, 
and without stirring from Paris?” 

“ Yes.” 

“ Well, then?” 

“Pshaw ! I am at my thirty-third mandarin.” 

“ Seriously, though. Look here, suppose you were sure 
that you could do it, and had only to give a nod. Would you 
do it?” 

“Is he well stricken in years, this mandarin of yours? 
Pshaw ! after all, young or old, paralytic, or well and sound, 
my word for it Well, then. Hang it, no ! ” 

“You are a good fellow, Bianchon. But suppose you loved 
a woman well enough to lose your soul in hell for her, and 
that she wanted money, lots of money for dresses and a car- 
riage, and all her whims, in fact? ” 

“ Why, here you are taking away my reason, and want me 
to reason ! ” 

“ Well, then, Bianchon, I am mad ; bring me to my senses. 
I have two sisters as beautiful and innocent as angels, and I 
want them to be happy. How am I to find two hundred 
thousand francs a piece for them in the next five years ? Now 
and then in life, you see, you must play for heavy stakes, and 
it is no use wasting your luck on low play.” 

10 


146 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


“ But you are only stating the problem that lies before 
every one at the outset of his life, and you want to cut the 
Gordian knot with a sword. If that is the way of it, dear 
boy, you must be an Alexander, or to the hulks you go. For 
my own part, I am quite contented with the little lot I mean 
to make for myself somewhere in the country, when I mean 
to step into my father’s shoes and plod along. A man’s 
affections are just as fully satisfied by the smallest circle as 
they can be by a vast circumference. Napoleon himself could 
only dine once, and he could not have more mistresses than a 
house-student at the Capuchins. Happiness, old man, depends 
on what lies between the sole of your foot and the crown of 
your head ; and whether it costs a million or a hundred louis, 
the actual amount of pleasure that you receive rests entirely 
with you, and is just exactly the same in any case. I am for 
letting that Chinaman live.” 

“Thank you, Bianchon ; you have done me good. We 
will always be friends.” 

“I say,” remarked the medical student, as they came to 
the end of a broad walk in the Jardin des Plantes, “ I saw 
the Michonneau and Poiret a few minutes ago on a bench 
chatting with a gentleman whom I used to see in last year’s 
troubles hanging about the Chamber of Deputies ; he seems 
to me, in fact, to be a detective dressed up like a decent 
retired tradesman. Let us keep an eye on that couple ; I will 
tell you why some time. Good-by; it is nearly four o’clock, 
and I must be in to answer to my name.” 

When Eugene reached the lodging-house, he found Father 
Goriot waiting for him. 

“ Here ! ” cried the old man, “ here is a letter from her. 
Pretty handwriting, eh ? ” 

Eugene broke the seal and read — 

“Sir: — I have heard from my father that you are fond of 
Italian music. I shall be delighted if you will do me the 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


147 


pleasure of accepting a seat in my box. La Fodor and Pelle- 
grini will sing on Saturday, so I am sure that you will not 
refuse me. M. de Nucingen and I shall be pleased if you 
will dine with us ; we shall be quite by ourselves. If you 
will come and be my escort, my husband will be glad to be 
relieved from his conjugal duties. Do not answer, but simply 
come. Yours sincerely, 

“ D. DE N.” 

“ Let me see it,” said Father Goriot, when Eugene had 
read the letter. “You are going, aren’t you?” he added, 
when he had smelt the writing-paper. “ How nice it smells ! 
Her fingers have touched it, that is certain.” 

“A woman does not fling herself at a man’s head in this 
way,” the student was thinking. “She wants to use me to 
bring back de Marsay ; nothing but pique makes a woman do 
a thing like this.” 

“Well,” said Father Goriot, “what are you thinking 
about? ” 

Eugene did not know the fever of vanity that possessed 
some women in those days ; how should he imagine that to 
open a door in the Faubourg Saint-Germain a banker’s wife 
would go to almost any length. For the coterie of the 
Faubourg Saint-Germain was a charmed circle, and the women 
who moved in it were at that time the queens of society ; and 
among the greatest of these “Ladies of the Little Castle,” as 
they were called, were Mme. de Beauseant and her friends the 
Duchesse de Langeais and the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse. 
Rastignac was alone in his ignorance of the frantic efforts 
made by women who lived in the Chausde-d’Antin to enter 
this seventh heaven and shine among the brightest constella- 
tions of their sex. But his cautious disposition stood him in 
good stead, and kept his judgment cool, and the not alto- 
gether enviable power of imposing instead of accepting 
conditions. 


148 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


“ Yes, I am going,” he replied. 

So it was curiosity that drew him to Mme. de Nucingen ; 
while, if she had treated him disdainfully, passion, perhaps, 
might have brought him to her feet. Still he waited almost 
impatiently for to-morrow, and the hour when he could go to 
her. There is almost as much charm for a young man in a 
first flirtation as there is in first love, The certainty of suc- 
cess is a source of happiness to which men do not confess, 
and all the charm of certain women lies in this. The desire 
of conquest springs no less from the easiness than from the 
difficulty of triumph, and every passion is excited or sustained 
by one or other of these two motives which divide the empire 
of love. Perhaps this division is one result of the great 
question of temperaments ; which, after all, dominates social 
life. The melancholic temperament may stand in need of 
the tonic of coquetry, while those of nervous or sanguine 
complexion withdraw if they meet with a too stubborn resist- 
ance. In other words, the lymphatic temperament is essen- 
tially despondent and the rhapsodic is bilious. 

Eugene lingered over his toilet with an enjoyment of all 
its little details that is grateful to a young man’s self-love, 
though he will not own to it for fear of being laughed at. 
He thought, as he arranged his hair, that a pretty woman’s 
glances would wander through the dark curls. He indulged 
in childish tricks like any young girl dressing for a dance, and 
gazed complacently at his graceful figure while he smoothed 
out the creases of his coat. 

“There are worse figures, that is certain,” he said to' 
himself. 

Then he went downstairs, just as the rest of the household 
were sitting down to dinner, and took with good-humor the 
boisterous applause excited by his elegant appearance. The 
amazement with which any attention to dress is regarded in a 
lodging-house is a very characteristic trait. No one can put 
on a new coat but every one else must say his say about it. 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


149 


“ Clk ! elk! elk!” cried Bianchon, making the sound 
with his tongue against the roof of his mouth, like a driver 
urging on a horse. 

“ He holds himself like a duke and a peer of France,” 
said Mme. Vauquer. 

“ Are you going a-courting?” inquired Mile. Michon- 
neau. 

“ Cock-a-doodle-doo?” cried the artist. 

“ My compliments to my lady, your wife,” from the em- 
ploye at the Museum. 

“ Your wife ; have you a wife ? ” interposed the redoubtable 
Poiret. 

“ Yes, in compartments, water-tight and floats, guaranteed 
fast color, all prices from twenty-five to forty sous, neat check 
patterns in the latest fashion and best taste, will wash, half- 
linen, half-cotton, half-wool ; a certain cure for toothache 
and other complaints under the patronage of the Royal Col- 
lege of Physicians ! children like it ! a remedy for headache, 
indigestion, and all other diseases affecting the throat, eyes, 
and ears! ” cried Vautrin, with the comical imitation of the 
volubility of a quack at a fair. “And how much shall we 
say for this marvel, gentlemen ? Twopence? No. Nothing 
of the sort. All that is left in stock after supplying the Great 
Mogul. All the crowned heads of Europe, including the 
Gr-r-r-rand Duke of Baden, have been anxious to get a sight 
of it. Walk up ! walk up ! gentlemen ! Pay at the desk as 
you go in ! Strike up the music there ! Brooum, la, la, trinn ! 
la, la, bourn ! bourn ! Mister Clarionet, there you are out of 
tune!” he added gruffly; “I will rap your knuckles for 
. you ! ’ ’ 

“ Goodness ! what an amusing man ! ” said Mme. Vauquer 
to Mme. Couture; “I should never feel dull with him in 
the house.” 

This burlesque of Vautrin’s was the signal for an outburst 
of merriment, and under cover of jokes and laughter Eugene 


150 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


caught * glance from Mile. Taillefer ; she had leaned over to 
say a few words in Mine. Couture’s ear. 

“The cab is at the door,” announced Sylvie. 

“But where is he going to dine ? ” asked Bianchon. 

“ With Madame la Baronne de Nucingen.” 

“ M. Goriot’s daughter,” said the law student. 

At this, all eyes turned to the old vermicelli-maker ; he was 
gazing at Eugene with something like envy in his eyes. 

Rastignac reached the house in the Rue Saint-Lazare, one 
of those many-windowed houses with a mean-looking portico 
and slender columns, which are considered the thing in Paris ; 
a typical banker’s house, decorated in the most ostentatious 
fashion ; the walls lined with stucco, the landings of marble 
mosaic. Mine, de Nucingen was sitting in a little drawing- 
room ; the room was painted in the Italian fashion, and dec- 
orated like a restaurant. The Baroness seemed depressed. 
The effort that she made to hide her feelings aroused Eugene’s 
interest ; it was plain that she was not playing a part. He 
had expected a little flutter of excitement at his coming, and 
he found her dispirited and sad. The disappointment piqued 
his vanity. 

“My claim to your confidence is very small, madame,” 
he said, after rallying heron her abstracted mood; “but if 
I am in the way, please tell me so frankly ; I count on your 
good faith.” 

“ No, stay with me,” she said ; “I shall be all alone if you 
go. Nucingen is dining in town, and I do not want to be 
alone ; I want to be taken out of myself.” 

“ But what is the matter ? ” 

“You are the very last person whom I should tell,” she 
exclaimed. 

“Then I am connected in some way with this secret. I 
wonder what it is.” 

“Perhaps. Yet, no,” she went on; “it is a domestic 
quarrel, which ought to be buried in the depths of the heart. 






11 AM I TO YOUR TASTE?” 




FATHER GORIOT. 


151 


I am very unhappy ; did I not tell you so the day before 
yesterday? Golden chains are the heaviest of all fetters.” 

When a woman tells a young man that she is very unhappy, 
and when the young man is clever, and well-dressed, and has 
fifteen hundred francs lying idle in his pocket, he is sure to 
think as Eugene said, and he becomes a coxcomb. 

“What can you have left to wish for?” he answered. 
“You are young, beautiful, beloved, and rich.” 

“ Do not let us talk of my affairs,” she said, shaking her 
head mournfully. “ We will dine together tetc-a-iete , and 
afterwards we will go to hear the most exquisite music. Am 
I to your taste?” she went on, rising and displaying her 
gown of white cashmere, covered with Persian designs in the 
most superb taste. 

“I wish that you were altogether mine,” said Eugene; 
“you are charming.” 

“You would have a forlorn piece of property,” she said, 
smiling bitterly. “ There is nothing about me that betrays 
my wretchedness ; and yet, in spite of appearances, I am in 
despair. I cannot sleep; my troubles have broken my night’s 
rest ; I shall grow ugly.” 

“Oh ! that is impossible,” cried the law student; “but I 
am curious to know what these troubles can be that a devoted 
love cannot efface.” 

“Ah! if I were to tell you about them, you would shun 
me,” she said. “ Your love for me as yet is only the conven- 
tional gallantry that men use to masquerade in ; and, if you 
really loved me, you would be driven to despair. I must keep 
silent, you see. Let us talk of something else for pity’s 
sake,” she added. “ Let me show you my rooms.” 

“No; let us stay here,” answered Eugene; he sat down 
on the sofa before the fire, and boldly took Mme. de Nucin- 
gen’s hand in his. She surrendered it to him ; he even felt 
the pressure of her fingers in one of the spasmodic clutches 
that betray terrible agitation. 

V 


152 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


“Listen,” said Rastignac; “if you are in trouble, you 
ought to tell me about it. I want to prove to you that I love 
you for yourself alone. You must speak to me frankly about 
your troubles, so that I can put an end to them, even if I have 
to kill half-a-dozen men ; or I shall go, never to return.” 

“Very well,” she cried, putting her hand to her forehead 
in an agony of despair, “ I will put you to the proof, and this 
very moment. Yes,” she said to herself, “I have no other 
resource left.” 

She rang the bell. 

“Are the horses put in for the master?” she asked of the 
servant. 

“Yes, madame.” 

“ I shall take his carriage myself. He can have mine and 
my horses. Serve dinner at seven o’clock.” 

“Now, come with me,” she said to Eugene, who thought 
as he sat in the banker’s carriage beside Mme. de Nucingen 
that he must surely be dreaming. 

“To the Palais-Royal,” she said to the coachman ; “ stop 
near the Theatre-Francos. ” 

She seemed to be too troubled and excited to answer the 
innumerable questions that Eugene put to her. He was at 
a loss what to think of her mute resistance, her obstinate 
silence. 

“Another moment and she will escape me,” he said to 
himself. 

When the carriage stopped at last, the Baroness gave the law 
student a glance that silenced his wild words, for he was almost 
beside himself. 

“ Is it true that you love me ? ” she asked. 

“Yes,” he answered, and in his manner and tone there 
was no trace of the uneasiness that he felt. 

“You will not think ill of me, will you, whatever I may 
ask of you ? ” 

“No.” 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


153 


“ Are you ready to do my bidding ? ” 

“ Blindly.” 

“ Have you ever been to a gaming-house ? ” she asked in a 
tremulous voice. 

“ Never.” 

“ Ah ! now I can breathe. You will have luck. Here is 
my purse,” she said. “ Take it ! there are a hundred francs 
in it, all that such a fortunate woman as I can call her own. 
Go up into one of the gaming-houses — I do not know where 
they are, but there are some near the Palais-Royal. Try your 
luck with the hundred francs at a game they call roulette ; 
lose it all, or bring me back six thousand francs. I will tell 
you about my troubles when you come back.” 

“ Devil take me, I’m sure, if I have a glimmer of a notion 
of what I am about, but I will obey you,” he added, with 
inward exultation, as he thought, “ She has gone too far to 
draw back — she can refuse me nothing now ! ” 

Eugene took the dainty little purse, inquired the way of 
a second-hand clothes-dealer, and hurried to number 9, which 
happened to be the nearest gaming-house. He mounted the 
staircase, surrendered his hat, and asked the way to the 
roulette-table, whither the attendant took him, not a little 
to the astonishment of the regular comers. All eyes were 
fixed on Eugene as he asked, without bashfulness, where he 
was to deposit his stakes. 

“ If you put a louis on one only of those thirty-six 
numbers, and it turns up, you will win thirty-six louis,” said 
a respectable-looking, white-haired old man in answer to his 
inquiry. 

Eugene staked the whole of his money on the number 
21 (his own age). There was a cry of surprise; before he 
knew what he had done, he had won. 

“Take your money off, sir,” said the old white-haired 
gentleman; “you don’t often win twice running by that 
system of playing.” 


154 


FATHER G OR JOT. 


Eugene took the rake that the old man handed to him, 
and drew in his three thousand six hundred francs, and, still 
perfectly ignorant of what he was about, staked again on the 
red. The bystanders watched him enviously as they saw him 
continue to play. The disc turned, and again he won ; the 
banker threw him three thousand six hundred francs once 
more. 

“ You have seven thousand two hundred francs of your 
own,” the old gentleman said in his ear. “ Take my advice 
and go away with your winnings ; red has turned up eight 
times already. If you are charitable, you will show your 
gratitude for sound counsel by giving a trifle to an old prefect 
of Napoleon’s who is down on his luck and without the means 
to stake anew.” 

Rastignac’s head was swimming ; he saw ten of his louis 
pass into the white-haired man’s possession, and went down- 
stairs with his seven thousand francs ; he was still ignorant of 
the game, and stupefied by his luck. 

“ So that is over; and now where will you take me? ” he 
asked, as soon as the door was closed, and he showed the 
seven thousand francs to Mme. de Nucingen. 

Delphine flung her arms about him, but there was no pas- 
sion in that wild embrace. 

“ You have saved me ! ” she cried, and tears of joy flowed 
fast. 

“I will tell you everything, my friend. For you will be 
my friend, will you not? I am rich, you think, very rich ; 
I have everything I want, or I seem as if I had everything. 
Very well, you must know that M. de Nucingen does not 
allow me the control of a single penny; he pays all the bills 
for the house expenses ; he pays for my carriages and opera 
box ; he does not give me enough to pay for my dress, and 
he reduces me to poverty in secret on purpose. I am too 
proud to beg from him. I should be the vilest of women if I 
could take his money at the price at which he offers it. Do 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


155 


you ask how I, with seven hundred thousand francs of my own, 
could let myself be robbed ? It is because I was proud, and 
scorned to speak. We are so young, so artless when our 
married life begins ! I never could bring myself to ask my 
husband for money ; the words would have made my lips 
bleed, I did not dare to ask ; I spent my savings first, and 
then the money that my poor father gave me, then I ran into 
debt. Marriage for me is a hideous farce ; I cannot talk 
about it ; let it suffice to say that Nucingen and I have sepa- 
rate rooms, and that I would fling myself out of the window 
sooner than consent to any other manner of life. I suffered 
agonies when I had to confess to my girlish extravagance, my 
debts for jewelry and trifles (for our poor father had never 
refused us anything, and spoiled us), but at last I found 
courage to tell him about them. After all, I had a fortune 
of my own. Nucingen flew into a rage ; he said that I should 
be the ruin of him, and used frightful language ; I wished 
myself a hundred feet down in the earth. He had my dowry, 
so he paid my debts, but he stipulated at the same time that 
my expenses in the future must not exceed a certain fixed sum, 
and I gave way for the sake of peace. And then,” she went 
on, “ I wanted to gratify the self-love of some one whom you 
know. He may have deceived me, but I should do him the 
justice to say that there was nothing petty in his character. 
But, after all, he threw me over disgracefully. If, at a 
woman’s utmost need, somebody heaps gold upon her, he ought 
never to forsake her ; that love should last for ever ! But 
you, at one-and-twenty, you, the soul of honor, with the un- 
sullied conscience of youth, will ask me how a woman can 
bring herself to accept money in such a way. Mon Dim / is 
it not natural to share everything with the one to whom we 
owe our happiness? When all has been given, why should 
we pause and hesitate over a part? Money is as nothing 
between us until the moment when the sentiment that bound 
us together ceases to exist. Were we not bound to each other 


166 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


for life ? Who that believes in love foresees such an end of 
love? You swear to love us eternally; how, then, can our 
interests be separate? 

“ You do not know how I suffered to-day when Nucingen 
refused to give me six thousand francs ; he spends as much 
as that every month on his mistress, an opera dancer ! I 
thought of killing myself. The wildest thoughts came into 
my head. There have been moments in my life when I have 
envied my servants, and would have changed places with my 
maid. It was madness to think of going to our father, An- 
astasie and I have bled him dry ; our poor father would have 
sold himself if he could have raised six thousand francs that 
way. I should have driven him frantic to no purpose. You 
have saved me from shame and death ; I was beside myself 
with anguish. Ah ! monsieur, I owed you this explanation 
after my mad ravings. When you left me just now, as soon 

as you were out of sight, I longed to escape, to run away 

where, I did not know. Half the women in Paris lead such 
lives as mine ; they live in apparent luxury, and in their souls 
are tormented by anxiety. I know of poor creatures even 
more miserable than I ; there are women who are driven to 
ask their tradespeople to make out false bills, women who 
rob their husbands. Some men believe that an India shawl 
worth a hundred louis only cost five hundred francs, others 
that a shawl costing five hundred francs is worth a hundred 
louis. There are women, too, with narrow incomes, who 
scrape and save and starve their children to pay for a dress. 
I am innocent of these base meannesses. But this is the last 
extremity of my torture. Some women will sell themselves 
to their husbands, and so obtain their way, but I, at any rate, 
am free. If I chose, Nucingen would cover me with gold, 
but I would rather weep on the breast of a man whom I can 
respect. Ah ! to-night, M. de Marsay will no longer have a 
right to think of me as a woman whom he has paid.” She 
tried to conceal her tears from him, hiding her face in her 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


157 


hands; Eugene drew them away and looked at her; she 
seemed to him sublime at that moment. 

“ It is hideous, is it not,” she cried, “ to speak in a breath 
of money and affection? You cannot love me after this,” 
she added. 

The incongruity between the ideas of honor which make 
women so great and the errors in conduct which are forced 
upon them by the constitution of society had thrown Eugene’s 
thoughts into confusion ; he uttered soothing and consoling 
words, and wondered at the beautiful woman before him, and 
at the artless imprudence of her cry of pain. 

“ You will not remember this against me?” she asked; 
“ promise me that you will not.” 

“Ah! madame, I am incapable of doing so,” he said. 
She took his hand and held it to her heart, a movement full 
of grace that expressed her deep gratitude. 

“I am free and happy once more, thanks to you,” she said. 
“Oh ! I have felt lately as if I were in the grasp of an iron 
hand. But after this I mean to live simply and to spend 
nothing. You will think me just as pretty, will you not, 
my friend ? Keep this,” she went on, as she took only six of 
the bank-notes. “ In conscience I owe you a thousand crowns, 
for I really ought to go halves with you.” 

Eugene’s maiden conscience resisted; but when the Baron- 
ess said, “ I am bound to look on you as an accomplice or as 
an enemy,” he took the money. 

“It shall be a last stake in reserve,” he said, “in case of 
misfortune.” 

“That was what I was dreading to hear,” she cried, turn- 
ing pale. “ Oh, if you would that I should be anything to 
you, swear to me that you will never re-enter a gaming-house. 
Great heaven ! that I should corrupt you ! I should die of 
sorrow ! ” 

They had reached the Rue Saint-Lazare by this time. The 
contrast between the ostentation of wealth in the house and 


158 


FATHER GORIOT. 


the wretched condition of its mistress dazed the student ; and 
Vautrin’s cynical words began to ring in his ears. 

“Seat yourself there/’ said the Baroness, pointing to a low 
chair beside the fire, “ I have a difficult letter to write,” she 
added. “Tell me what to say.” 

“Say nothing,” Eugene answered her. “Put the bills in 
an envelope, direct it, and send it by your maid.” 

“Why, you are a love of a man,” she said. “Ah ! see 
what it is to have been well brought up. That is the Beau- 
seant through and through,” she went on, smiling at him. 

“She is charming,” thought Eugene, more and more in 
love. He looked round him at the room ; there was an osten- 
tatious character about the luxury, a meretricious taste in the 
splendor. 

“ Do you like it ? ” she asked, as she rang for her maid. 

“Therese, take this to M. de Marsay, and give it into his 
hands yourself. If he is not at home, bring the letter back 
to me.” 

Therese went, but not before she had given Eugene a spite- 
ful glance. 

Dinner was announced. Rastignac gave his arm to Mme. 
de Nucingen, she led the way into a pretty dining-room, and 
again he saw the luxury of the table which he had admired in 
his cousin’s house. 

“ Come and dine with me on opera evenings, and we will 
go to the Italiens afterwards,” she said. • 

“ I should soon grow used to the pleasant life if it could 
last, but I am a poor student, and I have my way to make.” 

“Oh ! you will succeed,” she said, laughing. “You will 
see. All that you wish will come to pass, /did not expect 
to be so happy.” 

It is the wont of women to prove the impossible by the 
possible, and to annihilate facts by presentiments. When 
Mme. de Nucingen and Rastignac took their places in her 
box at the Bouffons, her face wore a look of happiness that 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


169 


made her so lovely that every one indulged in those small 
slanders against which women are defenseless ; for the scandal 
that is littered lightly is often seriously believed. Those who 
know Paris believe nothing that is said, and say nothing of 
what is done there. 

Eugene took the Baroness’ hand in his, and by some light 
pressure of the fingers, or a closer grasp of the hand, they 
found a language in which to express the sensations which the 
music gave them. It was an evening of intoxicating delight 
for both ; and when it ended, and they went out together, 
Mme. de Nucingen insisted on taking Eugene with her as far 
as the Pont Neuf, he disputing with her the whole of the way 
for a single kiss after all those that she had showered upon 
him so passionately at the Palais-Royal ; Eugene reproached 
her with inconsistency. 

“That was gratitude,” she said, “ for devotion that I did 
not dare to hope for, but now it would be a promise.” 

“And will you give me no promise, ingrate?” 

He grew vexed. Then, with one of those impatient gestures 
that fill a lover with ecstasy, she gave him her hand to kiss, 
and he took it with a discontented air that delighted her. 

“ I shall see you at the ball on Monday,” she said. 

As Eugene went home in the moonlight, he fell to serious 
reflections. He was satisfied, and yet dissatisfied. He was 
pleased with an adventure which would probably give him his 
desire, for in the end one of the prettiest and best-dressed 
women in Paris would be his; but, as a set-off, he saw his 
hopes of fortune brought to nothing ; and, as soon as he real- 
ized this fact, the vague thoughts of yesterday evening began 
to take a more decided shape in his mind. A check is sure 
to reveal to us the strength of our hopes. The more Eugene 
learned of the pleasures of life in Paris, the more impatient 
he felt of poverty and obscurity. He crumpled the bank-note 
in his pocket, and found any quantity of plausible excuses for 
appropriating it. 


160 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


He reached the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve at last, and 
from the stairhead he saw a light in Goriot’s room ; the old 
man had lighted a candle, and set the door ajar, lest the 
student should pass him by, and go to his room without “ tell- 
ing him all about his daughter,” to use his own expression. 
Eugene, accordingly, told him everything that transpired and 
without reserve. 

“ Then they think that I am ruined ! ” cried Father Goriot, 
in an agony of jealousy and desperation. “ Why, I have still 
thirteen hundred livres a year ! Alon Dieu ! Poor little girl ! 
why did she not come to me ? I would have sold my rentes ; 
she should have had some of the principal, and I would have 
bought a life-annuity with the rest. My good neighbor, why 
d\(\ you not come to tell me of her difficulty? How had you 
the heart to go and risk her poor little hundred francs at play? 
This is heart-breaking work. You see what it is to have sons- 
in-law. Oh ! if I had hold of them, I would wring their 
necks. Mon Dieu / crying! Did you say she was crying ? ” 

“ With her head on my waistcoat,” said Eugene. 

“Oh! give it to me,” said Father Goriot. “What! my 
daughter’s tears have fallen there — my darling Delphine, who 
never used to cry when she was a little girl ! Oh ! I will buy 
you another ; do not wear it again ; let me have it. By the 
terms of her marriage-contract she ought to have the use of 
her property. To-morrow morning I will go and see Derville ; 
he is an attorney. I will demand that her money should be 
invested in her own name. I know the law. I am an old 
wolf; I will show my teeth.” 

“Here, father; this is a bank-note for a thousand francs 
that she wanted me to keep out of our winnings. Keep them 
for her, in the pocket of the waistcoat.” 

Goriot looked hard at Eugene, reached out and took the 
law-student’s hand, and Eugene felt a tear fall on it. 

“ You will succeed,” the old man said. “ God is just, you 
see. I know an honest man when I see him, and I can tell 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


161 


you, there are not many men like you. I am to have another 
dear child in you, am I ? There, go to sleep; you can sleep, 
you are not yet a father. She was crying ! and I have to be 
told about it ! — and I was quietly eating my dinner, like an 
idiot, all the time — I, who would sell my soul to save one 
tear to either of them.” 

“ An honest man ! ” said Eugene to himself as he lay down. 
“ Upon my word, I think I will be an honest man all my life ; 
it is so pleasant to obey the voice of conscience.” Perhaps 
none but believers in God do good in secret ; and Eugene 
believed in a God. 

The next day Rastignac went at the appointed time to 
Mme. de Beauseant, who took him with her to the Duchesse 
de Carigliano’s ball. The Duchesse received Eugene most 
graciously. Mme. de Nucingen was there. Delphine’s dress 
seemed to suggest that she wished for the admiration of others, 
so that she might shine the more in Eugene’s eyes ; she was 
eagerly expecting a glance from him, hiding, as she thought, 
this eagerness from all beholders. This moment is full of 
charm for the one who can guess all that passes in a woman’s 
mind. Who has not refrained from giving his opinion, to 
prolong her suspense, concealing his pleasure from a desire to 
tantalize, seeking a confession of love in her uneasiness, 
enjoying the fears that he can dissipate by a smile ? In the 
course of the evening the law student suddenly comprehended 
his position ; he saw that, as the cousin of Mme. de Beauseant, 
he was a personage in this world. He was already credited 
with the conquest of Mme. de Nucingen, and for this reason 
was a conspicuous figure ; he caught the envious glances of 
other young men, and experienced the earliest pleasures of 
coxcombry. People wondered at his luck, and scraps of these 
conversations came to his ears as he went from room to room ; 
all the women prophesied his success ; and Delphine, in her 
dread of losing him, promised that this evening she would not 
11 


162 


FATHER GO RIOT 


refuse the kiss that all his entreaties could scarcely win 
yesterday. 

Rastignac received several invitations. His cousin pre- 
sented him to other women who were present ; women who 
could claim to be of the highest fashion ; whose houses were 
looked upon as pleasant; and this was the loftiest and most 
fashionable society in Paris into which he was launched. So 
this evening had all the charm of a brilliant debut ; it was 
an evening that he was to remember even in old age, as a 
woman looks back on her first ball and the memories of her 
girlish triumphs. 

The next morning at breakfast, he related the story of his 
success for the benefit of Father Goriot and the lodgers. 
Vautrin began to smile in a diabolical fashion. 

“And do you suppose,” cried that cold-blooded logician, 
“ that a young man of fashion can live here in the Rue 
Neuve-Sainte-Genevidve, in the Maison Vauquer — an exceed- 
ingly respectable boarding-house in every way, I grant you, 
but an establishment that, none the less, falls short of being 
fashionable ? The house is comfortable, it is lordly in its 
abundance ; it is proud to be the temporary abode of a Ras- 
tignac ; but, after all, it is in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve, 
and luxury would be out of place here, where we only aim at 
the purely patriarchalorama. If you mean to cut a figure in 
Paris, my young friend,” Vautrin continued, with half-paternal 
jocularity, “you must have three horses, a tilbury for the 
mornings, and a closed carriage for the evenings ; you should 
spend altogether about nine thousand francs on your stables. 
You would show yourself unworthy of your destiny if you 
spent no more than three thousand francs with your tailor, six 
hundred in perfumery, a hundred crowns to your shoemaker, 
and a hundred more to your hatter. As for your laundress, 
there goes another thousand francs ; a young man of fashion 
must of necessity make a great point of his linen ; if your 
linen comes up to the required standard, people often do not 


FATHER GORIOT. 


163 


look any farther. Love and the church demand a fair altar- 
cloth. That is fourteen thousand francs. I am saying nothing 
of losses at play, bets, and presents ; it is impossible to allow 
less than two thousand francs for pocket money. I have led 
that sort of life, and I know all about these expenses. Add 
the cost of necessaries next ; three hundred louis for proven- 
der, a thousand francs for a place to roost in. Well, my boy, 
for all these little wants of ours we had need to have twenty- 
five thousand francs every year in our purse, or we shall find 
ourselves in the kennel, and people laughing at us, and our 
career is cut short, good-by to success, and good-by to your 
mistress. I am forgetting your valet and your groom ! Is 
Christophe going to carry your billets-doux for you ? And do 
you mean to employ the stationery you use at present ? Sui- 
cidal policy! Hearken to the wisdom of your elders ! ” he 
went on, his bass voice growing louder at each syllable. 
“Either take up your quarters in a garret, live virtuously, and 
wed your work, or set about the thing in a different way.” 

Vautrin winked and leered in the direction of Mile. Tail- 
lefer to enforce his remarks by a look which recalled the late 
tempting proposals by which he had sought to corrupt the 
student’s mind. 

Several days went by, and Rastignac lived in a whirl of 
gaiety. He dined almost every day with Mme. de Nucingen, 
and went wherever she went, only returning to the Rue Neuve- 
Sainte-Genevieve in the small hours. He rose at mid-day, 
and dressed to go into the Bois with Delphine if the day was 
fine, squandering in this way time that was worth far more 
than he knew. He turned as eagerly to learn the lessons of 
luxury, and was as quick to feel its fascination as the flowers 
of the date palm to receive the fertilizing pollen. He played 
high, lost and won large sums of money, and at last became 
accustomed to the extravagant life that young men lead in 
Paris. He sent fifteen hundred francs out of his first winnings 
to his mother and sisters, sending handsome presents as well 


164 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


as the money, He had given out that he meant to leave the 
Maison Vauquer ; but January came and went, and he was 
still there, still unprepared to go. 

One rule holds good of most young men — whether rich or 
poor. They never have money for the necessaries of life, 
but they always have money to spare for their caprices — an 
anomaly which finds its explanation in their youth and in 
the almost frantic eagerness with which youth grasps at 
pleasure. They are reckless with anything obtained on credit, 
while everything for which they must pay in ready money is 
made to last as long as possible ; if they cannot have all 
that they want, they make up for it, it would seem, by 
squandering what they have. To state the matter simply — 
a student is far more careful of his hat than of his coat, 
because the latter being a comparatively costly article of dress, 
it is in the nature of things that a tailor should be a creditor ; 
but it is otherwise with the hatter ; the sums of money spent 
with him are so modest that he is the most independent and 
unmanageable of his tribe, and it is almost impossible to bring 
him to terms. The young man in the balcony of a theatre 
who displays a gorgeous waistcoat for the benefit of the fair 
owners of opera glasses has very probably no socks in his 
wardrobe, for the hosier is another of the genus of weevils 
that nibble at the purse. This was Rastignac’s condition. 
His purse was always empty for Mme. Vauquer, always full at 
the demand of vanity ; there was a periodical ebb and flow in 
his fortunes, which was seldom favorable to the payment of 
just debts. If he was to leave that unsavory and mean abode, 
where from time to time his pretensions met with humiliation, 
the first step was to pay his hostess for a month’s board and 
lodging, and the second to purchase furniture worthy of the 
new lodgings he must take in his quality of dandy, a course 
remained impossible. Rastignac, out of his winnings at 
cards, could pay his jeweler exorbitant prices for gold 
watches and chains, and, then to meet the exigencies of play. 


FATHER GO RIOT. 165 

would carry them to the pawnbroker, that discreet and forbid- 
ding-looking friend of youth ; but when it was a question of 
paying for board or lodging, or for the necessary implements 
for the cultivation of his Elysian fields, his imagination and 
pluck alike deserted him. There was no inspiration to be 
found in vulgar necessity, in debts contracted for past require- 
ments. Like most of those who trust to their luck, he put 
off till the last moment the payment of debts that among the 
bourgeoisie are regarded as sacred engagements, acting on 
the plan of Mirabeau, who never settled his baker’s bill until 
it underwent a formidable transformation into a bill of 
exchange. 

It was about this time, when Rastignac was down on his 
luck and fell into debt, that it became clear to the law-student’s 
«nind that he must have some more certain source of income 
xi he meant to live as he had been doing. But while he 
groaned over the thorny problems of his precarious situation, 
he felt that he could not bring himself to renounce the pleas- 
ures of this extravagant life, and decided that he must con- 
tinue it at all costs. His dreams of obtaining a fortune 
appeared more and more chimerical, and the real obstacles 
grew more formidable. His initiation into the secrets of the 
Nucingen household had revealed to him that if he were to 
attempt to use this love affair as a means of mending his 
fortunes, he must swallow down all sense of decency, and 
renounce all the generous ideas which redeem the sins of 
youth. He had chosen this life of apparent splendor, but 
secretly gnawed by the canker-worm of remorse, a life of 
fleeting pleasure dearly paid for by persistent pain ; like “ Le 
Distrait ” of La Bruyere, he had descended so far as to make 
his bed in a ditch ; but (also like “ Le Distrait ”) he himself was 
uncontaminated as yet by the mire that stained his garments. 

“So we have killed our mandarin, have we?” said Bian- 
chon one day as they left the dinner table. 

“ Not yet,” he answered, “but he is at the last gasp.’' 


166 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


The medical student took this for a joke, but it was not a 
jest. Eugene had dined in the house that night for the first 
time in a long while, and had looked thoughtful during the 
meal. He had taken his place beside Mile. Taillefer, and 
stayed through the dessert, giving his neighbor an expressive 
glance from time to time. A few of the boarders discussed 
the walnuts at the table, and others walked about the room, 
still taking part in a conversation which had begun among 
them. People usually went when they chose ; the amount of 
time that they lingered being determined by the amount of 
interest that the conversation possessed for them, or by the 
difficulty of the process of digestion. In winter-time the 
room was seldom empty before eight o’clock, when the four 
women had it all to themselves, and made up for the silence 
previously imposed upon them by the preponderating mascu- 
line element. This evening Vautrin had noticed Eugene’s 
abstractedness, and stayed in the room, though he had seemed 
to be in a hurry to finish his dinner and go. All through the 
talk afterwards he had kept out of sight of the law student, 
who quite believed that Vautrin had left the room. He now 
took up his position cunningly in the sitting-room instead of 
going when the last boarders went. He had fathomed the 
young man’s thoughts, and felt that a crisis was at hand. 
Rastignac was, in fact, in a dilemma, which many another 
young man under similar circumstances must have most 
readily understood. 

Mme. de Nucingen might love him, or might merely be 
playing with him, but in either case Rastignac had been made 
to experience all the alternations of hope and despair of 
genuine passion, and all the diplomatic arts of a Parisienne 
had been employed on him. After compromising herself by 
continually appearing in public with Mme. de Beauseant’s 
cousin she still hesitated, and would not give him the lover’s 
privileges which he appeared to enjoy. For a whole month 
she had so wrought on his senses, that at last she had made an 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


167 


impression on his heart. If in the earliest days the student 
had fancied himself to be the master, Mme. de Nucingen had 
since become the stronger of the two, for she had skillfully 
roused and played upon every instinct, good or bad, in the 
two or three men comprised in a young student in Paris. 
This was not the result of deep design on her part, nor was 
she playing a part, for women are in a manner true to them- 
selves even through their grossest deceit, because their actions 
are prompted by a natural impulse. It may have been that 
Delphine, who had allowed this young man to gain such an 
ascendency over her, conscious that she had been too demon- 
strative, was obeying a sentiment of dignity, and either re- 
pented of her concessions, or it pleased her to suspend them. 
It is so natural to a Parisienne, even when passion has almost 
mastered her, to hesitate and pause before taking the plunge ; 
to probe the heart of him to whom she intrusts her future. 
And once already Mme. de Nucingen’s hopes had been be- 
trayed, and her loyalty to a selfish young lover had been 
despised. She had good reason to be suspicious. Or it may 
have been that something in Eugene’s manner (for his rapid 
success was making a coxcomb of him) had warned her that 
the grotesque nature of their position had lowered her some- 
what in his eyes. She doubtless wished to assert her dignity ; 
he was young, and she would be great in his eyes; for the 
lover who had forsaken her had so underestimated her that she 
was determined that Eugdne should not think her an easy con- 
quest, and for this very reason — he knew that de Marsay had 
been his predecessor. Finally, after the degradation of sub- 
mission to the pleasure of a heartless young rake, it was so 
sweet for her to wander in the flower-strewn realms of love, 
that it was not wonderful that she should wish to dwell a while 
on the prospect, to tremble with the vibrations of love, to feel 
the freshness of the breath of its dawn. The true lover was 
suffering for the sins of the false. This inconsistency is 
unfortunately only to be expected so long as men do not know 


168 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


how many flowers are mown down in a young woman’s soul 
by the first stroke of treachery. 

Whatever her reasons may have been, Delphine was play- 
ing with Rastignac, and took pleasure in playing with him, 
doubtless because she felt sure of his love, and confident that 
she could put an end to the torture as soon as it was her royal 
pleasure to do so. Eugene’s self-love was engaged ; he could 
not suffer his first passage of love to end in a defeat, and per- 
sisted in his suit, like a sportsman determined to bring down 
at least one partridge to celebrate his first Feast of Saint 
Hubert. The pressure of anxiety, his wounded self-love, his 
despair, real or feigned, drew him nearer and nearer to this 
woman. All Paris credited him with this conquest, and yet 
he was conscious that he had made no progress since the day 
when he saw Mme. de Nucingen for the first time. He did 
not know as yet that a woman’s coquetry is sometimes more 
delightful than the pleasure of secure possession of her love, 
and was possessed with helpless rage. If, at this time, while she 
denied herself to love, Eugene gathered the springtide spoils 
of his life, the fruit, somewhat sharp and green, and dearly 
bought, was no less delicious to the taste. There were 
moments when he had not a sou in his pockets, and at such 
times he thought in spite of his conscience of Vautrin’s offer 
and the possibility of fortune by a marriage with Mile. 
Taillefer. Poverty would clamor so loudly that more than 
once he was on the point of yielding to the cunning tempta- 
tions of the terrible sphinx, whose glance had so often exerted 
a strange spell over him. His dilemma, in short, at this time 
proved most perplexing, and he felt greatly depressed in spirit. 

Poiret and Mile. Michonneau went up to their rooms ; and 
Rastignac, thinking that he was alone with the women in the 
dining-room, sat between Mme. Vauquer and Mme. Couture, 
who was nodding over the woolen cuffs that she was knitting 
by the stove, and looked at Mile. Taillefer so tenderly that 
she lowered her eyes. 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


169 


e( Can you be in trouble, M. Eugene?” Victorine said 
after a pause. 

“ Who has not his troubles ? ” answered Rastignac. “ If we 
men were sure of being loved, sure of a devotion which 
would be our reward for the sacrifices which we are always 
ready to make, then perhaps we should have no troubles.” 

For answer Mile. Taillefer only gave him a glance, but it 
was impossible to mistake its meaning. 

“You, for instance, mademoiselle; you feel sure of your 
heart to-day, but are you sure that it will never change?” 

A smile flitted over the poor girl’s lips ; it seemed as if a ray 
of light from her soul had lighted up her face. Eugene was 
dismayed at the sudden explosion of feeling caused by his 
words. 

“Ah! but suppose,” he said, “that you should be rich 
and happy to-morrow, suppose that a vast fortune dropped 
down from the clouds for you, would you still love the man 
whom you loved in your days of poverty?” 

A charming movement of the head was her only answer to 
the question propounded. 

“Even if he were very poor?” 

Again the same mute answer. 

“What nonsense you are talking, you two?” exclaimed 
Mme. Vauquer. 

“Never mind,” answered Eugene; “we understand each 
other.” 

“ So there is to be an engagement of marriage between 
M. le Chevalier Eugene de Rastignac and Mile. Victorine 
Taillefer, is there!” The words were uttered in Vautrin’s 
deep voice, and Vautrin appeared at the door as he spoke. 

“Oh! how you startled me!” Mme. Couture and Mme. 
Vauquer exclaimed together. 

“I might make a worse choice,” said Rastignac, laughing. 
Vautrin’s voice had thrown him into the most painful agita- 
tion that he had yet known. 


170 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


“ No bad jokes, gentlemen ! ” said Mme. Couture. “ My 
dear, let us go upstairs.” 

Mme. Vauquer followed the two ladies, meaning to pass 
the evening in their room, an arrangement that economized 
fire and candlelight. Eugdne and Vautrin were left alone. 

“I felt sure you would come round to it,” said the elder 
man with the coolness that nothing seemed to shake. “But 
stay a moment. I have as much delicacy as anybody else. 
Don’t make up your mind on the spur of the moment; you 
are a little thrown off your balance just now. You are in 
debt, and I want you to come over to my way of thinking 
after sober reflection, and not in a fit of passion or desperation. 
Perhaps you want a thousand crowns. There, you can have 
them if you like.” 

The tempter took out a pocket-book, and drew thence three 
bank-notes, which he fluttered before the student’s eyes. 
Eugene was in a most painful dilemma. He had debts, debts 
of honor. He owed a hundred louis to the Marquis d’Ajuda 
and to the Comte de Trailles ; he had not the money, and for 
this reason had not dared to go to Mme. de Restaud’s house, 
where he was expected that evening. It was one of those 
informal gatherings where tea and little cakes are handed 
round, but where it is possible to lose six thousand francs at 
whist in the course of a night. 

“You must see,” said Eugene, struggling to hide a con- 
vulsive tremor, “that after what has passed between us, I 
cannot possibly lay myself under any obligation to you.” 

“Quite right; I should be sorry to hear you speak other- 
wise,” answered the tempter. “ You are a fine young fellow, 
honorable, brave as a lion, and as gentle as a young girl. 
You would be a fine haul for the devil ! I like youngsters of 
your sort. Get rid of one or two more prejudices, and you 
will see the world as it is. Make a little scene now and then, 
and act a virtuous part in it, and a man with a head on his 
shoulders can do exactly as he likes amid deafening applause 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


171 


from the fools in the gallery. Ah ! a few days yet, and you 
will be with us ; and if you would only be tutored by me, I 
would put you in the way of achieving all your ambitions. 
You should no sooner form a wish than it should be realized 
to the full ; you should have all your desires — honors, wealth, 
or women. Civilization should flow with milk and honey for 
you. You should be our pet and favorite, our Benjamin. We 
would all work ourselves to death for you with pleasure ; every 
obstacle should be removed from your path. You have a few 
prejudices left ; so you think that I am a scoundrel, do you? 
Well, M. de Turenne, quite as honorable a man as you take 
yourself to be, had some little private transactions with bandits, 
and did not feel that his honor was tarnished. You would 
rather not lay under any obligation to me, eh? You need not 
draw back on that account,” Vautrin went on, and a smile 
stole over his lips. “ Take those bits of paper and write 
across this,” he added, producing a piece of stamped paper, 
“Accepted the sum of three thousand five hundred francs due this 
day twelvemonth , and fill in the date. The rate of interest is 
stiff enough to silence any scruples on your part ; it gives you 
the right to call me a Jew. You can call quits with me on 
the score of gratitude. I am quite willing that you should 
despise me to-day, because I am sure that you will have a 
kindlier feeling towards me later on. You will find out 
fathomless depths in my nature, enormous and concentrated 
forces that weaklings call vices, but you will never find me 
base or ungrateful. In short, I am neither a pawn nor a 
bishop, but a castle, a tower of strength, my boy.” 

“ What manner of man are you ? ” cried Eugene. “ Were 
you created to torment me?” 

“ Why, no ; I am a good-natured fellow, who is willing to do 
a dirty piece of work to put you high and dry above the mire 
for the rest of your days. Do you ask the reason of this 
devotion ? All right ; I will tell you that some of these days. 
A word or two in your ear will explain it. I have begun by 


172 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


shocking you, by showing you the way to ring the changes, 
and giving you a sight of the mechanism of the social machine ; 
but your first fright will go off like a conscript’s terror on the 
battlefield. You will grow used to regarding men as common 
soldiers who have made up their minds to lose their lives for 
some self-constituted king. Times have altered strangely. 
Once you could say to a bravo, ‘ Here are a hundred crowns ; 
go and kill Monsieur So-and-so for me,’ and you could sup 
quietly after turning some one off into the dark for the least 
thing in the world. But nowadays I propose to put you in the 
way of a handsome fortune : you have only to nod your head, 
it won’t compromise you in any way, and you hesitate. ’Tis 
an effeminate age.” 

Eugene accepted the draft, and received the bank-notes in 
exchange for it. 

“Well, well. Come, now, let us talk rationally,” Vautrin 
continued. “I mean to leave this country in a few months’ 
time for America, and set about planting tobacco. I will 
send you the cigars of friendship. If I make money at it, I 
will help you in your career. If I have no children — which 
will probably be the case, for I have no anxiety to raise slips 
of myself here — you shall inherit my fortune. That is what 
you may call standing by a man ; but I myself have a liking 
for you. I have a mania, too, for devoting myself to some 
one else. I have done it before. You see, my boy, I live in 
a loftier sphere than other men do ; I look on all actions as 
means to an end, and the end is all that I look at. What is 
a man’s life to me? Not that" he said, and he snapped his 
thumb-nail against his teeth. “ A man, in short, is every- 
thing to me, or just nothing at all. Less than nothing if his 
name happens to be Poiret ; you can crush him like a bug, he 
is flat and he is offensive. But a man is a god when he is like 
you ; he is not a machine covered with a skin, but a theatre 
in which the greatest sentiments are displayed — great thoughts 
and feelings — and for these, and these only, I live. A senti- 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


173 


ment — what is that but the whole world in a thought ? Look 
at Father Goriot. For him, his two girls are the whole uni- 
verse ; they are the clue by which he finds his way through 
creation. Well, for my own part, and I have fathomed the 
depths of life, there is only one real sentiment — comradeship 
between man and man. Pierre and Jaffier, that is my passion. 
I know “ Venice Preserved ” by heart. Have you met many 
men plucky enough when a comrade says, ‘ Let us bury a dead 
body ! ’ to go and do it without a word or plaguing him by 
taking a high moral tone ? I have done it myself. I should 
not talk like this to just everybody, but you are not like an 
ordinary man ; one can talk to you, you can understand 
things. You will not dabble about much longer among the 
tadpoles in these swamps. Well, then, it is all settled. You 
will marry. Both of us carry our point. Mine is made of 
iron, and will never soften, he ! he ! ” 

Vautrin went out. He would not wait to hear the student’s 
repudiation, he wished to put Eugene at his ease. He seemed 
to understand the secret springs of the faint resistance still 
made by the younger man ; the struggles in which men seek 
to preserve their self-respect by justifying their blameworthy 
actions to themselves. 

“ He may do as he likes; I shall not marry Mile. Taillefer, 
that is certain,” said Eugene to himself. 

He regarded this man with abhorrence, and yet the very 
cynicism of Vautrin’s ideas, and the audacious way in which 
he used other men for his own ends, raised him in the student’s 
eyes ; but the thought of a compact threw Eugene into a fever 
of apprehension, and not until he had recovered somewhat 
did he dress, call for a cab, and go to Mme. de Restaud’s. 

For some days the Countess had paid more and more atten- 
tion to a young man whose every step seemed a triumphal 
progress in the great world ; it seemed to her that he might 
be a formidable power before long. He paid Messieurs de 
Trailles and d’Ajuda, played at whist for part of the evening, 


174 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


and made good his losses. Most men who have their way to 
make are more or less fatalists, and Eugene was superstitious ; 
he chose to consider that his luck was heaven’s reward for 
his perseverance in the right way. As soon as possible on 
the following morning he asked Vautrin whether the bill that 
he had given was still in the other’s possession ; and on re- 
ceiving a reply in the affirmative, he repaid the three thousand 
francs with a not unnatural relief. 

“ Everything is going on well,” said Vautrin. 

“ But I am not your accomplice,” said Eugene. 

“ I know, I know,” Vautrin broke in. “ You are still act- 
ing like a child. Y.ou are making mountains out of molehills 
at the outset.” 

Two days later, Po-iret and Mile. Michonneau were sitting 
together on a bench in the sun. They had chosen a little 
frequented alley in the Jardin des Plantes, and a gentleman 
was chatting with them, the same person, as a matter of fact, 
about whom the medical student had, not without good reason, 
his own suspicions. 

“ Mademoiselle,” this M. Gondureau was saying, “ I do 
not see any cause for your scruples. His excellency mon- 
seigneur the minister of police ” 

“Ah!” echoed Poiret, “His excellency monseigneur the 
minister of police ! ” 

“Yes, his excellency is taking a personal interest in the 
matter,” said Gondureau. 

Who would think it probable that Poiret, a retired clerk, 
doubtless possessed of some notions of civic virtue, though 
there might be nothing else in his head — who would think it 
likely that such a man would continue to lend an ear to this 
supposed independent gentleman of the Rue de Buffon, when 
the latter dropped the mask of a decent citizen by that word 
“police,” and gave a glimpse of the features of a detective 
from the Rue de Jerusalem ? And yet nothing was more 
natural. Perhaps the following remarks from the hitherto 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


175 


unpublished records made by certain observers will throw a 
light on the particular species to which Poiret belonged in the 
great family of fools. There is a race of quill-drivers, con- 
fined in the columns of the budget between the first degree of 
latitude (a kind of administrative Greenland where the salaries 
begin at twelve hundred francs) to the third degree, a more 
temperate zone, where incomes grow from three to six thou- 
sand francs, a climate where the bonus flourishes like a half- 
hardy annual in spite of some difficulties of culture. A char- 
acteristic trait that best reveals the feeble narrow-mindedness 
of these inhabitants of petty officialdom is a kind of involun- 
tary, mechanical, and instinctive reverence for the Grand 
Lama of every ministry, known to the rank and file only by 
his signature (an illegible scrawl) and by his title — “ His ex- 
cellency monseigneur le minister,” five words which produce 
as much effect as the “Bond of Cain” of the Caliph of Bagdad, 
five words which in the eyes of this low order of intelligence 
represent a sacred power from which there is no appeal. The 
minister is administratively infallible for the clerks in the 
employ of the government, as the pope is infallible for good 
Catholics. Something of his peculiar radiance invests every- 
thing he does or says, or that is said or done in his name ; 
the robe of office covers everything and legalizes everything 
done by his orders ; does not his very title — his excellency — 
vouch for the purity of his intentions and the righteousness of 
his will, and serve as a sort of passport and introduction to ideas 
that otherwise would not be entertained for a moment ? Pro- 
nounce the words “his excellency,” and these poor folk will 
forthwith proceed to do what they would not do for their own 
interests. Passive obedience is as well known in a govern- 
ment department as in the army itself ; and the administrative 
system silences consciences, annihilates the individual, and 
ends (give it time enough) by fashioning a man into a vise or 
a thumbscrew, and he becomes part of the machinery of gov- 
ernment. Wherefore, M. Gondureau, who seemed to know 


176 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


something of human nature, recognized Poiret at once as one 
of these dupes of officialdom, and brought out for his benefit, 
at the proper moment, the deus ex machina , the magical words 

“ his excellency,” so as to dazzle Poiret just as he himself un- 

% 

masked his batteries, for he took Poiret and the Michonneau 
for the male and female of the same species. 

“ If his excellency himself, his excellency the minister 

Ah ! that is quite another thing,” said Poiret. 

“ You seem to be guided by this gentleman’s opinion, and 
you hear what he says,” said the man of independent means, 
addressing Mile. Michonneau. “ Very well, his excellency is 
at this moment absolutely certain that the so-called Vautrin, 
who lodges at the Maison Vauquer, is a convict who escaped 
from penal servitude at Toulon, where he is known by the 
nickname Trompe-la-Mort ” (Death’s defier). 

“ Trompe-la-Mort ? ” said Poiret. “ Dear me, he is very 
lucky if he deserves that nickname.” 

“Well, yes,” said the detective. “ They call him so be- 
cause he has been so lucky as not to lose his life in the very 
risky businesses that he has carried through. He is a danger- 
ous man, you see ! He has qualities that are out of the com- 
mon ; the thing he is wanted for, in fact, was a matter which 
gained him no end of credit with his own set ” 

“Then he is a man of honor?” asked Poiret. 

“ Yes, according to his notions. He agreed to take another 
man’s crime upon himself — a forgery committed by a very 
handsome young fellow that he had taken a great fancy to, a 
young Italian, a bit of a gambler, who has since gone into the 
army, where his conduct has been unexceptionable.” 

“ But if his excellency the minister of police is certain 
that M. Vautrin is this Trompe-la-Mort , why should he want 
me?” asked Mile. Michonneau. 

“Oh, yes,” said Poiret, “if the minister, as you have 
been so obliging as to tell us, really knows for a certainty 
that — — ” 


FATHER GO RIOT 


177 


“ Certainty is not the word ; he only suspects. You will 
soon understand how things are. Jacques Collin, nicknamed 
Tro7npe-la-Mort , is in the confidence of every convict in the 
three prisons ; he is their man of business and their banker. 
He makes a very good thing out of managing their affairs? 
which want a man of mark to see about them.” 

“ Ha ! ha! do you see the pun, mademoiselle?” asked 
Poiret. “ This gentleman calls him a man of mark because 
he is a marked man — branded, you know.” 

“This so-called Vautrin,” said the detective, “receives 
the money belonging to my lords the convicts, invests it for 
them, and holds it at the disposal of those who escape, or 
hands it over to their families if they leave a will, or to their 
mistresses when they draw upon him for their benefit.” 

“Their mistresses! You mean their wives,” remarked 
Poiret. 

“ No, sir. A convict's wife is usually an illegitimate con- 
nection. We call them concubines.” 

“Then they all live in a state of concubinage?” 

“ Naturally.” 

“Why, these are abominations that his excellency ought 
not to allow. Since you have the honor of seeing his excel- 
lency, you, who seem to have philanthropic ideas, ought 
really to enlighten him as to their immoral conduct — they are 
setting a shocking example to the rest of society.” 

“ But the government does not hold them up as models of 
all the virtues, my dear sir.” 

“ Of course not, sir ; but still ” 

“Just let the gentleman say what he has to say, dearie,” 
said Mile. Michonneau. 

“You see how it is, mademoiselle,” Gondureau continued. 
“ The government may have the strongest reasons for getting 
this illicit hoard into its hands; it mounts up to something 
considerable, by all that we can make out. Trompe-la-Mort 
not only holds very large sums for his friends the convicts, 
12 


178 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


but he has other amounts which are paid over to him by the 
Society of the Ten Thousand ” 

“Ten Thousand Thieves!” cried Poiret at this, in the 
utmost alarm. 

“ No. The Society of the Ten Thousand is not an associa- 
tion of petty offenders, but of people who set about their 
work on a large scale — they won’t touch a matter unless there 
are ten thousand francs in it. It is composed of the most 
distinguished of the men who are sent straight to the assize 
courts when they come up for trial. They know the Code 
too well to risk their necks when they are nabbed. Collin is 
their confidential agent and legal adviser. By means of the 
large sums of money at his disposal he has established a sort 
of detective system of his own ; it is widespread, and mysteri- 
ous in its workings. We have had spies all about him for a 
twelvemonth, and yet we could not manage to fathom his 
games. His capital and his cleverness are at the service of 
vice and crime ; this money furnishes the necessary funds for 
a regular army of blackguards in his pay who wage incessant 
war against society. If we can catch Trompe-la-Mort, and 
take possession of his funds, we should strike at the root of 
this evil. So this job is a kind of government affair — a state 
secret — and likely to redound to the honor of those who bring 
the thing to a successful conclusion. You, sir, for instance, 
might very well be taken into a government department 
again ; they might make you secretary to a commissary of 
police ; you could accept that post without prejudice to your 
retiring pension.” 

Mile. Michonneau interposed at this point with, “What is 
there to hinder Trompe-la-Mort from making off with the 
money ? ” 

“ Oh ! ” said the detective, “ a man is told off to follow him 
everywhere he goes, with orders to kill him if he were to rob 
the convicts. Then it is not quite as easy to make off with a 
lot of money as it is to run away with a young lady of family. 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


179 


Besides, Collin is not the sort of fellow to play such a trick ; 
he would be disgraced, according to his notions.” 

“ You are quite right, sir,” said Poiret, “ utterly disgraced 
he would be.” 

“ But none of all this explains why you do not come and 
take him without more ado,” remarked Mile. Michonneau. 

“ Very well, mademoiselle, I will explain — but,” he added 
in her ear, “ keep your companion quiet, or I shall never have 
done. The old boy ought to pay people handsomely for 
listening to him. Trompe-la-Mort, when he came back here,” 
he went on aloud, “ slipped into the skin of an honest man; 
he turned up disguised as a decent Parisian citizen, and took 
up his quarters in an unpretending lodging-house. He is 
cunning, that he is! You won’t catch him napping. Then 
M. Vautrin is a man of consequeuce, who transacts a good 
deal of business.” 

“Naturally,” said Poiret to himself. 

“ And suppose that the minister were to make a mistake 
and get hold of the real Vautrin, he would put every one’s 
back up among the business men in Paris, and public opinion 
would be against him. M. le prefet de police is on slippery 
ground ; he has enemies. They would take advantage of any 
mistake. There would be a fine outcry and fuss made by the 
Opposition, and he would be sent packing. We must set 
about this just as we did about the Cogniard affair, the sham 
Comte de Sainte-Helene : if he had been the real Comte de 
Sainte-Helene, we should have been in the wrong box. We 
want to be quite sure what we are about.” 

“ Yes, but what you want is a pretty woman,” said Mile. 
Michonneau briskly. 

“ Trompe-la-Mort would not let a woman come near him,” 
said the detective. “ I will tell you a secret — he does not 
like them.” 

“ Still, I do not see what I can do, supposing that I did 
agree to identify him for two thousand francs.” 


180 


FATHER GO RIOT, 


“ Nothing simpler,” said the stranger. “ I will send you a 
little bottle containing a dose that will send a rush of blood 
to the head ; it will do him no harm whatever, but he will fall 
down as if he were in a fit. The drug can be put into wine 
or coffee; either will do equally well. You carry your man 
to bed at once, and undress him to see that he is not dying. 
As soon as you are alone, you give him a slap on the shoulder, 
and, presto ! the letters will appear.” 

“ Why, that is just nothing at all,” said Poiret, very 
complacently. 

“Well, do you agree?” said Gondureau, addressing the 
old maid. 

“ But, my dear sir, suppose there are no letters at all,” said 
Mile. Michonneau; “am I to have the two thousand francs 
all the same ? ” 

“No.” 

“ What will you give me, then? ” 

“Five hundred francs.” 

“It is quite a thing to do for so little! It lies on your 
conscience just the same, and I must quiet my conscience, 
sir.” 

“I assure you,” said Poiret, “that mademoiselle has a 
great deal of conscience, and not only so, she is a very amiable 
person, and very intelligent.” 

“ Well, now,” Mile. Michonneau went on, “ make it three 
thousand francs if he is Trompe-la-Mort, and nothing at all 
if he is an ordinary man.” 

“Done!” said Gondureau, “but on condition that the 
thing is settled to-morrow.” 

“ Not quite so soon, my dear sir; I must consult my con- 
fessor first.” 

“You are a sly one,” said the detective as he rose to his 
feet. “ Good-by till to-morrow, then. And if you should 
want to see me in a hurry, go to the Petite Rue Sainte-Anne 
at the bottom of the Cour de la Sainte-Chapelle. There is 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


181 


only one door under the archway. Ask there for M. 
Gondureau.” 

Bianchon, on his way back from Cuvier’s lecture, overheard 
the sufficiently striking nickname of Trompe-la-Mort , and 
caught the celebrated chief detective’s “ Do?ie!" 

“Why didn’t you close with him? It would be three 
hundred francs a year,” said Poiret to Mile. Michonneau. 

“ Why didn’t I?” she asked. “ Why, it wants thinking 
over. Suppose that M. Vautrin is this Trompe-la-Mort, 
perhaps we might do better for ourselves with him. Still, on 
the other hand, if you ask him for money, it would put him 
on his guard, and he is just the man to clear out without 
paying, and that would be an abominable sell.” 

“ And suppose you did warn him,” Poiret went on, “didn’t 
that gentleman say that he was closely watched ? You would 
spoil everything.” 

“Anyhow,” thought Mile. Michonneau, “I can’t abide 
him. He says nothing but disagreeable things to me.” 

“But you can do better than that,” Poiret resumed. “As 
that gentleman said (and he seemed to me to be a very good 
sort of man, besides being very well got up), it is an act of 
obedience to the laws to rid society of a criminal, however 
virtuous he may be. Once a thief, always a thief. Suppose 
he were to take it into his head to murder us all ? The deuce ! 
We should be guilty of manslaughter, and be the first to fall 
victims into the bargain ! ” 

Mile. Michonneau’ s musings did not permit her to listen 
very closely to the remarks that fell one by one from Poiret’s 
lips like water dripping from a leaky tap. When once this 
elderly babbler began to talk, he would go on like clockwork 
unless Mile. Michonneau stopped him. He started on some 
subject or other, and wandered on through parenthesis after 
parenthesis till he came to regions as remote as possible from 
his premises without coming to any conclusions by the way. 

By the time they reached the Maison Vauquer he had tacked 


182 


FATHER G OR TOT. 


together a whole string of examples and quotations more or 
less irrelevant to the subject in hand, which led him to give a 
full account of his own deposition in the case of the Sieur 
Ragoulleau versus Dame Morin, when he had been summoned 
as a witness for the defense. 

As they entered the dining-room, Eugene de Rastignac was 
talking apart with Mile. Taillefer; the conversation appeared 
to be of such thrilling interest that the pair never noticed the 
two older lodgers as they passed through the room. None of 
this was thrown away on Mile. Michonneau. 

“ I knew how it would end,” remarked that lady, address- 
ing Poiret. “ They have been making eyes at each other in 
a heart-rending way for a week past.” 

“ Yes,” he answered. “ So she was found guilty.” 

“Who?” 

“ Mme. Morin.” 

“I am talking about Mile. Victorine,” said Mile. Michon- 
neau, as she entered Poiret’s room with an absent air, “and 
you answer, * Mme. Morin.’ Who may Mme. Morin be?” 

“What can Mile. Victorine be guilty of?” demanded 
Poiret. 

“ Guilty of falling in love with M. Eugene de Rastignac, 
and going farther and farther without knowing exactly where 
she is going, poor innocent ! ” 

That morning Mme. de Nucingen had driven Eugene to 
despair. In his own mind he had completely surrendered 
himself to Vautrin, and deliberately shut his eyes to the mo- 
tive for the friendship which that extraordinary man professed 
for him, nor would he look to the consequences of such an 
alliance. Nothing short of a miracle could extricate him now 
out of the gulf into which he had walked an hour ago, when 
he exchanged vows in the softest whispers with Mile. Taillefer. 
To Victorine it seemed as if she heard an angel’s voice, that 
heaven was opening above her; the Maison Vauquer took 






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S/AUTRIN CAME IN IN HIGH SPIRITS. 



FATHER GO RIOT. 


183 


strange and wonderful hues, like a stage fairy palace. She 
loved and she was beloved ; at any rate, she believed that she 
was loved ; and what woman would not likewise have believed 
after seeing Rastignac’s face and listening to the tones of his 
voice during that hour snatched under the argus eyes of the 
Maison Vauquer? He had trampled on his conscience; he 
knew that he was doing wrong, and did it deliberately ; he 
had said to himself that a woman’s happiness should atone 
for this venial sin. The energy of desperation had lent new 
beauty to his face ; the lurid fire that burned in his heart 
shone from his eyes. Luckily for him, the miracle took place. 
Vautrin came in in high spirits, and at once read the hearts 
of these two young creatures whom he had brought together 
by the combinations of his infernal genius, but his deep voice 
broke in upon their bliss. 

“A charming girl is my Fancheite 
In her simplicity 

he sang mockingly. 

Victorine fled. Her heart was more full than it had ever 
been, but it was full of joy, and not of sorrow. Poor child ! 
A pressure of the hand, the light touch of Rastignac’s hair 
against her cheek, a word whispered in her ear so closely that 
she felt the student’s warm breath on her, the pressure of a 
trembling arm about her waist, a kiss upon her throat — such 
had been her betrothal. The near neighborhood of the stout 
Sylvie, who might invade that glorified room at any moment, 
only made these first tokens of love more ardent, more elo- 
quent, more entrancing than the noblest deeds done for love’s 
sake in the most famous romances. This plain-song of love, 
to use the pretty expression of our forefathers, seemed almost 
criminal to the devout young girl who went to confession 
every fortnight. In that one hour she had poured out more 
of the treasures of her soul than she could give in later days 
of wealth and happiness, when her whole self followed the 
gift. 


G 


184 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


“ The thing is arranged,” Vautrin said to Eugene, who 
remained. “Our two dandies have fallen out. Everything 
was done in proper form. It is a matter of opinion. Our 
pigeon has insulted my hawk. They will meet to-morrow in 
the redoubt at Clignancourt. By half-past eight in the morn- 
ing Mile. Taillefer, calmly dipping her bread and butter in 
her coffee-cup, will be sole heiress of her father’s fortune and 
affections. A funny way of putting it, isn’t it? Taillefer’s 
youngster is an expert swordsman, and quite cocksure about 
it, but he will be bled ; I have just invented a thrust for his 
benefit, a way of raising your sword-point and driving it at 
the forehead. I must show you that thrust ; it is an uncom- 
monly handy thing to know.” 

Rastignac heard him in dazed bewilderment ; he could not 
find a word in reply. Just then Goriot came in, and Bianchon 
and a few of the boarders likewise appeared. 

“ That is just as I intended,” Vautrin said. “You know 
quite well what you are about. Good, my little eaglet ! You 
are born to command, you are strong, you stand firm on your 
feet, you are game ! I respect you.” 

He made as though he would take Eugene’s hand, but Ras- 
tignac hastily withdrew it, sank into a chair, and turned 
ghastly pale; it seemed to him that there was a sea of blood 
before his eyes. 

“ Oh ! so we have still a few dubious tatters of the swad- 
dling-clothes of virtue about us ! ” murmured Vautrin. “ But 
Papa Doliban has three millions ; I know the amount of his 
fortune. Once have her dowry in your hands, and your char- 
acter will be as white as the bride’s white dress, even in your 
own eyes.” 

Rastignac hesitated no longer. He made up his mind that 
he would go that evening to warn the Taillefers, father and 
son. But just as Vautrin left him, Father Goriot came up 
and said in his ear, “ You look melancholy, my boy ; I will 
cheer you up. Come with me.” 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


185 


The old vermicelli-dealer lighted his dip at one of the 
lamps as he spoke. Eugene went with him, his curiosity had 
been aroused. 

“Let us go up to your room,” the worthy soul remarked, 
when he had asked Sylvie for the law-student’s key. “ This 
morning,” he resumed, “you thought that she did not care 
about you, did you not, eh? She would have nothing to say 
to you, and you went away out of humor and out of heart. 
Stuff and rubbish ! She wanted you to go because she was 
expecting me / Now do you understand ? We were to com- 
plete the arrangements for taking some chambers for you, a 
jewel of a place, you are to move into it in three days’ time. 
Don’t split upon me. She wants it to be a surprise; but I 
couldn’t bear to keep the secret from you. You will be in 
the Rue d’Artois, only a step or two from the Rue Saint- 
Lazare, and you are to be housed like a prince ! Any one 
might have thought we were furnishing the house for a bride. 
Oh ! we have done a lot of things in the last month, and you 
knew nothing about it. My attorney has appeared on the 
scene, and my daughter is to have thirty-six thousand francs a 
year, the interest on her money, and I shall insist on having 
her eight hundred thousand francs invested in sound securi- 
ties, landed property that won’t run away.” 

Eugene was dumb. He folded his arms and paced up and 
down his cheerless, untidy room. Father Goriot waited till 
the student’s back was turned, and seized the opportunity 
to go to the chimney-piece and set upon it a little red morocco 
case with Rastignac’s arms stamped in gold on the leather. 

“My dear boy,” said the kind soul, “I have been up to 
the eyes in this business. You see, there was plenty of selfish- 
ness on my part ; I have an interested motive in helping you 
to change lodgings. You will not refuse me if I ask you 
something; will you, eh?” 

“ What is it ? ” 

“ There is a room on the fifth floor, up above your rooms, 


186 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


that is to let along with them ; that is where I am going to live, 
isn’t that so ? I am getting old ; I am too far from my girls. 
I shall not be in the way, but I shall be there, that is all. 
You will come and talk to me about her every evening. It 
will not put you about, will it ? I shall have gone to bed 
before you come in, but I shall hear you come up, and 
I shall say to myself, 4 He has just seen my little Delphine. 
He has been to a dance with her, and she is happy, thanks 
to him.’ If I were ill, it would do my heart good to 
hear you moving about below, to know when you leave 
the house and when you come in. It is only a step to 
the Champs-Elysees, where they go every day, so I shall be 
sure of seeing them, whereas now I am sometimes too late. 
And then — perhaps she may come to see you ! I shall hear 
her, I shall see her in her soft quilted pelisse tripping about as 
daintily as a kitten. In this one month she has become my 
little girl again, so light-hearted and gay. Her soul is recov- 
ering, and her happiness is owing to you. Oh ! I would do 
impossibilities for you. Only just now she said to me, ‘ I am 
very happy, papa! ’ When they say ‘father’ stiffly, it sends 
a chill through me; but when they call me ‘papa,’ it is as if 
they were little girls again, and it brings all the old memories 
back. I feel most their father then ; I even believe that 
they belong to me, and to no one else.” 

The good man wiped his eyes, he was crying. 

“It is a long while since I have heard them talk like that, 
a long, long time since she took my arm as she did to-day. 
Yes, indeed, it must be quite ten years since I walked side by 
side with one of my girls. How pleasant it was to keep step 
with her, to feel the touch of her gown, the warmth of her 
arm! Well, I took Delphine everywhere this morning; I 
went shopping with her, and I brought her home again. Oh ! 
you must let me live near you. You may want some one to 
do you a service some of these days, and I shall be on the 
spot to do it. Oh ! if only that great dolt of an Alsatian 


FATHER G OR 10 T. 


187 


would die, if his gout would have the sense to attack his 
stomach, how happy my poor child would be ! You would be 
my son-in-law; you would be her husband in the eyes of the 
world. Bah ! she has known no happiness, that excuses every- 
thing. Our Father in heaven is surely on the side of fathers 
on earth who love their children. How fond of you she is ! ” 
he said, raising his head after a pause. “All the time we 
were going about together she chatted away about you. 
1 He is nice-looking, papa; isn’t he? He is kind-hearted! 
Does he talk to you about me?’ Pshaw! she said enough 
about you to fill whole volumes; between the Rue d’Artois 
and the Passage des Panoramas she poured her heart out into 
mine. I did not feel old once during that delightful morn- 
ing; I felt as light as a feather. I told her how you had 
given that bank-note to me ; it moved my darling to tears. 
But what can this be on your chimney-piece ! ” said Father 
Goriot at last. Rastignac had showed no sign, and he was 
dying of impatience. 

Eugene stared at his neighbor in dumb and dazed bewilder- 
ment. He thought of Vautrin, of that duel to be fought to- 
morrow morning, and of this realization of his dearest hopes, 
and the violent contrast between the two sets of ideas gave 
him all the sensations of nightmare. He went to the chimney- 
piece, saw the little square case, opened it, and found a watch 
of Breguet’s make wrapped in paper, on which these words 
were written : 

“ I want you to think of me every hour, because 

“ Delphine.” 

That last word doubtless contained an allusion to some 
scene that had taken place between them. Eugene felt 
touched. Inside the gold watch-case his arms had been 
wrought in enamel. The chain, the key, the workmanship, 
and design of the trinket were all such as he had imagined. 


188 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


for he had long coveted such a possession. Father Goriot 
was radiant. Of course he had promised to tell his daughter 
every little detail of the scene and of the effect produced 
upon Eugene by her present ; he shared in the pleasure and 
excitement of the young people, and seemed to be not the 
least happy of the three. He loved Rastignac already for his 
own as well as for his daughter’s sake. 

“You must go and see her; she is expecting you this 
evening. That great lout of an Alsatian is going to have 
supper with his opera-dancer. Aha ! he looked very foolish 
when my attorney let him know where he was. Pie says he 
idolizes my daughter, does he ? He had better let her alone, 
or I will kill him. To think that my Delphine is his ” — he 
heaved a sigh — “ it is enough to make me murder him, but it 
would not be manslaughter to kill that animal ; he is a pig 
with a calf’s brains. You will take me with you, will you 
not?” 

“ Yes, dear Father Goriot; you know very well how fond 
I am of you ” 

“ Yes, I do know very well. You are not ashamed of me, 
are you ! Not you ! Let me embrace you,” and he flung his 
arms round the student’s neck. 

“You will make her very happy; promise me that you 
will ! You will go to her this evening, will you not?” 

“ Oh ! yes. I must go out ; I have some urgent business 
on hand.” 

“ Can I be of any use? ” 

“ My word, yes ! Will you go to old Taillefer’s while I 
go to Mme. de Nucingen. Ask him to make an appointment 
with me some time this evening ; it is a matter of life and 
death.” 

“ Really, young man ! ” cried Father Goriot, with a change 
of countenance; “are you really paying court to his daugh- 
ter, as those simpletons were saying down below ? God’s 

thunder! you have no notion what a tap d la Goriot is 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


189 


like, and if you are playing a double game, I shall put a 

stop to it by one blow of the fist Oh ! the thing is 

impossible!” 

I swear to you that I love but one woman in the world,” 
said the student. “ I only knew it a moment ago.” 

“ Oh ! what happiness ! ” cried Goriot. 

“ But young Taillefer has been called out; the duel comes 
off to-morrow morning, and I have heard it said that he may 
lose his life in it.” 

“ But what business is it of yours ? ” said Goriot. 

“ Why, I ought to tell him so, that he may prevent his son 
from putting in an appearance ” 

Just at that moment Vautrin’s voice broke in upon them ; 
he was standing at the threshold of his door and singing — 

“Oh! Richard , oh my king ! 

All the zvorld abandons thee ! 

Brourn ! broum! broum ! brourn ! broum / 

“ The same old story everywhere , 

A roving heart and a tra la la T 

“ Gentlemen ! ” shouted Christophe, “ the soup is ready, 
and every one is waiting for you.” 

“ Here,” Vautrin called down to him, “come and take a 
bottle of my Bordeaux.” 

“Do you think your watch is pretty?” asked Goriot. 
“ She has good taste, hasn’t she, eh ? ” 

Vautrin, Father Goriot, and Rastignac came downstairs in 
company, and, all three of them being late, were obliged to 
sit together. 

Eugene was as distant as possible in his manner to Vautrin 
during dinner; but the other, so charming in Mme. Vauquer’s 
opinion, had never been so witty. His lively sallies and 
sparkling talk put the whole table in good-humor. His 
assurance and great coolness filled Eugene with the utmost 
consternation. 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


190 

“Why, what has come to you to-day?” inquired Mme, 
Vauquer. “ You are as merry as a skylark.” 

“ I am always in spirits after I have made a good bargain.” 

“ Bargain ? ” asked Eugene. 

“Well, yes, bargain. I have just delivered a lot of goods, 
and I shall be paid a handsome commission on them. Mile. 
Michonneau,” he went on, seeing that the elderly spinster 
was scrutinizing him intently, “have you any objection to 
some feature in my face, that you are making those lynx-eyes 
at me ? Just let me know, and I will have it changed to 

oblige you We shall not fall out about it, Poiret, I 

daresay? ” he added, winking at the superannuated clerk. 

“Bless my soul, you ought to stand as model for a bur- 
lesque Hercules,” said the young painter. 

“ I will, upon my word ! if Mile. Michonneau will consent 
to sit as the Venus of Pere-Lachaise,” replied Vautrin. 

“There’s Poiret,” suggested Bianchon. 

“ Oh ! Poiret shall pose as Poiret. He can be a garden 
god ! ” cried Vautrin ; “his name means a pear ” 

“ A sleepy pear ! ” Bianchon put in. “ You will come in 
between the pear and the cheese.” 

“What stuff you are all talking!” said Mme. Vauquer; 
“ you would do better to treat us to your Bordeaux ; I see a 
glimpse of a bottle .there. It would keep us all in a good- 
humor, and it is good for the stomach besides.” 

“Gentlemen,” said Vautrin, “the lady president calls us 
to order. Mme. Couture and Mile. Victorine will take your 
jokes in good part, but respect the innocence of the aged 
Goriot. I propose a glass or two of Bordeauxrama, rendered 
twice illustrious by the name of Laffitte, no political allusions 
intended. Come, you Turk ! ” he added, looking at Chris- 
tophe, who did not offer to stir. “ Christophe ! Here! 
What, you don’t answer to your own name? Bring us some 
liquor, Turk ! ” 

“ Here it is, sir,” said Christophe, holding out the bottle. 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


191 


Vautrin filled Eugene’s glass and Goriot’s likewise, then he 
deliberately poured out a few drops into his own glass, and 
sipped it while his two neighbors drank their wine. All at 
once he made a grimace. 

“ Corked ! ” he cried. “ The devil ! You can drink the 
rest of this, Christophe, and go and find another bottle; 
take from the right-hand side, you know. There are sixteen 
of us ; take down eight bottles.” 

“ If you are going to stand treat,” said the painter, “I will 
pay for a hundred chestnuts.” 

“ Oh ! oh ! ” 

“ Booououh ! ” 

“ Prrrr ! ” 

These exclamations came from all parts of the table like 
squibs from a set firework. 

“ Come, now, Mamma Vauquer, a couple of bottles of 
champagne,” called Vautrin. 

“Eh, what ! just like you ! Why not ask for the whole house 
at once? A couple of bottles of champagne; that means 
twelve francs ! I shall never see the money back again, I 
know ! But if M. Eugene has a mind to pay for it, I have 
some currant cordial.” 

“ That currant cordial of hers is as bad as a black draught,” 
muttered the medical student. 

“Shut up, Bianchon,” exclaimed Rastignac; “the very 
mention of black draught makes me feel Yes, cham- 

pagne, by all means; I will pay for it,” he added. 

“Sylvie,” called Mme. Vauquer, “bring in some biscuits 
and the little cakes.” 

“Those little cakes are moldy graybeards,” said Vautrin. 
“ But trot out the biscuits.” 

The Bordeaux wine circulated ; the dinner table became a 
livelier scene than ever, and the fun grew fast and furious. 
Imitations of the cries of various animals mingled with the 
loud laughter; the Museum official having taken it into his 


192 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


head to mimic a cat-call rather like the caterwauling of the 
animal in question, eight voices simultaneously struck up with 
the following variations : 

“ Scissors to grind ! ” 

“ Chick-weed for singing bir-ds ! ” 

“ Gingersnaps, ladies! ” 

“ China to mend 1 ” 

“ Boat ahoy ! ” 

“ Sticks to beat your wives or your clothes ! ” 

“ Old clo’ ! ” 

Ci Cherry ripe, ripe, oh ! ” 

But the palm was awarded to Bianchon for the nasal accent 
with which he rendered the cry of “ Umbrellas to me-end ! ” 
A few seconds later, and there was a head-splitting racket 
in the room, a storm of tomfoolery, a sort of cats’ concert, 
with Vautrin as conductor of the orchestra, the latter keeping 
an eye the while on Eugene and Father Goriot. The wine 
seemed to have gone to their heads already. They leaned 
back in their chairs, looking at the general confusion with an 
air of gravity, and drank but little ; both of them were ab- 
sorbed in the thought of what lay before them to do that 
evening, and yet neither of them felt able to rise and go. 
Vautrin gave a side glance at them from time to time, and 
watched the change that came over their faces, choosing the 
moment when their eyes drooped and seemed about to close 
to bend over Rastignac and to say in his ear : 

“ My little lad, you are not quite shrewd enough to outwit 
Papa Vautrin yet, and he is too fond of you to let you make 
a mess of your affairs. When I have made up my mind to 
do a thing, no one short of Providence can put me off. 
Aha ! we were for going round to warn old Taillefer, telling 
tales out of school ! The oven is hot, the dough is kneaded, 
the bread is ready for the oven ; to-morrow we will eat it up 
and whisk away the crumbs ; and we are not going to spoil 
the baking ? No, no, it is all as good as done ! We 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


193 


may suffer from a few conscientious scruples, but they will be 
digested along with the bread. While we are having our 
forty winks, Colonel Count Franchessini will clear the way to 
Michel Taillefer’s inheritance with the point of his sword. 
Victorine will come in for her brother’s money, a snug fifteen 
thousand francs a year. I have made inquiries already, and 
I know that her late mother’s property amounts to more than 
three hundred thousand ” 

Eugene heard all this, and could not answer a word ; his 
tongue seemed to be glued to the roof of his mouth, an irre- 
sistible drowsiness was creeping over him. He still saw the 
table and the faces round it, but it was through a bright mist. 
Soon the noise began to subside, one by one the boarders 
went. At last, when their numbers had so dwindled that the 
party consisted of Mme. Vauquer, Mme. Couture, Mile. 
Victorine, Vautrin, and Father Goriot, Rastignac watched as 
though in a dream how Mme. Vauquer busied herself by col- 
lecting the bottles, and drained the remainder of the wine 
out of each to fill others. 

“ Oh ! how uproarious they are ! what a thing it is to be 
young ! ” said the widow. 

These were the last words that Eugene heard and under- 
stood. 

“ There is no one like M. Vautrin for a bit of fun like 
this,” said Sylvie. “There, just hark at Christophe, he is 
snoring like a top.” 

“ Good-by, mamma,” said Vautrin ; “lam going to a theatre 
on the Boulevard to see M. Marty in 'Le Mont Sauvage,’ a 

fine play taken from ‘ Le Solitaire’ If you like, I will 

take you and these two ladies ” 

“ Thank you; I must decline,” said Mme. Couture. 

“ What ! my good lady ! ” cried Mme. Vauquer, “decline 
to see a play founded on the ‘ Le Solitaire,’ a work by Atala de 
Chateaubriand. We were so fond of that book that we cried 
over it like Magdalens under the line trees last summer, and 
13 


194 


FATHER GORIOT. 


then it is an improving work that might edify your young 
lady.” 

“We are forbidden to go to the play,” answered Victo- 
rine. 

“Just look, those two yonder have dropped off where they 
sit,” said Vautrin, shaking the heads of the two sleepers in a 
comical way. 

He altered the sleeping student’s position, settled his head 
more comfortably on the back of his chair, kissed him warmly 
on the forehead, and began to sing — 

“Sleep, little darlings ; 

/ watch while you slumber 

“ I am afraid he may be ill,” said Victorine. 

“ Then stop and take care of him,” returned Vautrin. “ ’Tis 
your duty as a meek and obedient wife,” he whispered in her 
ear. “The young fellow worships you, and you will be his 
little wife — there’s your fortune for you. In short,” he added 
aloud, “ they lived happily ever afterwards, were much looked 
up to in all the countryside, and had a numerous family. 
That is how all the romances end. Now, mamma,’’ he went 
on, as he turned to Mme. Vauquer and put his arm round her 
waist, “ put on your bonnet, your best flowered silk, and the 
countess’ scarf, while I go out to call a cab — all my own- 
self.” 

And he started out, singing as he went — 

“ Oh / sun ! divine sun ! 

Ripening the pumpkins every one.” 

“ My goodness ! Well, I’m sure ! Mme. Couture, I could 
live happily in a garret with a man like that ! There now,” 
she added, looking round for the old vermicelli-maker, “there 
is that Father Goriot half-seas over. He never thought of 
taking me anywhere, the old skinflint. But he will measure 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


195 


his length somewhere. My word ! it is disgraceful to lose 
his senses like that, at his age ! You will be telling me that 
he couldn t lose what he hadn’t got — Sylvie ! just take him 
up to his room ! ” 

Sylvie took him by the arm, supported him upstairs, and 
flung him, just as he was, like a package, across the bed. 

“ Poor young fellow! ” said Mme. Couture, putting back 
Eugene’s hair that had fallen over his eyes; “he is like a 
young girl, he does not know what dissipation is?” 

“ Well, I can tell you this, I know,” said Mme. Vauquer, 
“I have taken lodgers these thirty years, and a good many 
have passed through my hands, as the saying is, but I have 
never seen a nicer nor a more aristocratic-looking young man 
than M. Eugene. How handsome he looks sleeping ! Just 
let his head rest on your shoulder, Mme. Couture. Pshaw ! 
he falls over towards Mile. Victorine. • There’s a special 
providence for young things. A little more, and he would 
have broken his head against the knob of the chair. They’d 
make a pretty pair, those two would ! ” 

“ Hush ! my good neighbor,” cried Mme. Couture, “ you 
are saying such things ” 

“ Pooh ! ” put in Mme. Vauquer, “ he does not hear. 
Here, Sylvie ! come and help me to dress. I shall put on 
my best stays.” 

“ What ! your best stays just after dinner, madame ? ” said 
Sylvie. “ No, you can get some one else to lace you. I am 
not going to be your murderer. It’s a rash thing to do, and 
might cost you your life.” 

“ I don’t care, I must do honor to M. Vautrin.” 

“Are you so fond of your heirs as all that ? ” 

“Come, Sylvie, don’t argue,” said the widow, as she left 
the room. 

“At her age, too ! ” said the cook to Victorine, pointing 
to her mistress as she spoke. 

Mme. Couture and her ward were left in the dining-room. 


196 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


and Eugene slept on on Victorine’s shoulder. The sound of 
Christophe’s snoring echoed through the silent house ; 
Eugene's quiet breathing seemed all the quieter by force of 
contrast, he was sleeping as peacefully as a child. Victorine 
was very happy ; she was free to perform one of those acts of 
charity which form an innocent outlet for all the overflowing 
sentiments of a woman’s nature; he was so close to her that 
she could feel the throbbing of his heart ; there was a look of 
almost maternal protection and a conscious pride in Victorine’s 
face. Among the countless thoughts that crowded up in her 
young innocent heart, there was a wild flutter of joy at this 
close contact. 

“ Poor, dear child !” said Mme. Couture, squeezing her 
hand. 

The old lady looked at the girl. Victorine’s innocent, 
pathetic face, so .radiant with the new happiness that had 
befallen her, called to mind some naive work of mediaeval art, 
when the painter neglected the accessories, reserving all the 
magic of his brush for the quiet, austere outlines and ivory 
tints of the face, which seems to have caught something of 
the golden glory of heaven. 

“After all, he only took two glasses, mamma,” said Vic- 
torine, as she lovingly passed her fingers through Eugene’s 
hair. 

“ Indeed, if he had been a dissipated young man, child, 
he would have carried his wine like the rest of them. His 
drowsiness does him credit.” 

There was a sound of wheels outside in the street. 

“There is M. Vautrin, mamma,” said the girl. “Just 
take M. Eugene. I would rather not have that man see me 
like this ; there are some ways of looking at you that seem 
to sully your soul and make you feel as though you had 
nothing on.” 

“ Oh, no, you are wrong ! ” said Mme. Couture. “ M. Vau- 
trin is a worthy man j he reminds me a little of my late 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


197 


husband, poor dear M. Couture, rough but kind-hearted; his 
bark is worse than his bite.” 

Vautrin came in while she was speaking ; he did not make 
a sound, but looked for a while at the picture of the two 
young faces — the lamplight falling full upon them seemed to 
caress them. 

“ Well,” he remarked, folding his arms, “ here is a picture! 
It would have suggested some pleasing pages to Bernardin de 
Saint-Pierre (good soiil), who wrote ‘Paul et Virginie.’ 
Youth is very charming, Mme. Couture ! Sleep on, poor 
boy,” he added, looking at Eugene, “ luck sometimes comes 
while we are sleeping. There is something touching and 
attractive to me about this young man, madame,” he con- 
tinued ; “ I know that his nature is in harmony with his face. 
Just look, the head of a cherub on an angel’s shoulder ! He 
deserves to be loved. If I were a woman I would die (no — 
not such a fool), I would live for him.” He bent lower and 
spoke in the widow’s ear. “ When I see those two together, 
madame, I cannot help thinking that Providence meant them 
for each other ; He works by secret ways, and tries the reins 
and the heart,” he said in a loud voice. “And when I see 
you, my children, thus united by a like purity and by all 
human affections, I say to myself that it is quite impossible 
that the future should separate you. God is just.” He turned 
to Victorine. “ It seems to me,” he said, “ that I have seen 
the line of success in your hand. Let me look at it, Mile. 
Victorine ; I am well up in palmistry, and I have told fortunes 
many a time. Come, now, don’t be frightened. Ah ! what 
do I see ? Upon my word, you will be one of the richest 
heiresses in Paris before very long. You will heap riches on 
the man who loves you. Your father will want you to go and 
live with him. You will marry a young and handsome man 
with a title, and he will idolize you.” 

The heavy footsteps of the coquettish widow, who was 
coming down the stairs, interrupted Vautrin’s fortune-telling. 


198 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


“ Here is Mamma Vauquer, fair as a starr-r-r, dressed within 
an inch of her life. Aren’t we a trifle pinched for room?” 
he inquired, with his arm round the lady ; “we are screwed 
up very tightly about the bust, mamma ! If we are much 
agitated, there may be an explosion ; but I will pick up the 
fragments with all the care of an antiquary.” 

“There is a man who can talk the language of French 
gallantry!” said the widow, bending to speak in Mme. 
Couture’s ear. 

“ Good-by, little ones! ” said Vautrin, turning to Eugene 

and Victorine. “ Bless vou both ! ” and he laid a hand on 

■ * 

either head. “ Take my word for it, young lady, an honest 
man’s prayers are worth something ; they should bring you 
happiness, for God hears them.” 

“Good-by, dear,” said Madame Vauquer to her lodger. 
“ Do you think that M. Vautrin means to run away with 
me ? ” she added, lowering her voice. 

“ Lack-a-day ! ” said the widow. 

“ Oh ! mamma dear, suppose it should really happen as that 
kind M. Vautrin said! ” said Victorine with a sigh, as she 
looked at her hands. The two women were alone together. 

“ Why, it wouldn’t take much to bring it to pass,” said the 
elder lady ; “just a fail from his horse, and your monster of a 
brother ” 

“ Oh ! mamma.” 

“Good Lord! Well, perhaps it is a sin to wish bad luck 
to an enemy,” the widow remarked. “ I will do penance for 
it. Still, I would strew flowers on his grave with the greatest 
pleasure, and that is the truth. Black-hearted, that he is ! 
The coward couldn’t speak up for his own mother, and 
cheats you out of your share by deceit and trickery. My 
cousin had a pretty fortune of her own, but, unluckily for you, 
nothing was said in the marriage contract about anything that 
she might come in for.” 

“ It would be very hard if my good-fortune is to cost some 


FATHER GO R 101. 


199 


one else his life,” said Victorine. “If I cannot be happy 
unless my brother is to be taken out of the world, I would 
rather stay here all my life.” 

“ Mon Dieu ! it is just as that good M. Vautrin says, and 
he is full of piety, you see,” Mme. Couture remarked. “ I 
am very glad to find that he is not an unbeliever like the 
rest of them that talk of the i Almighty with less respect than 
they do of the devil. Well, as he was saying, who can 

know the ways by which it may please Providence to 

lead us ? ” 

With Sylvie’s help the two women at last succeeded in 
getting Eugene up to his room ; they laid him on the bed, 
and the cook unfastened his clothes to make him more com- 
fortable. Before they left the room, Victorine snatched an 
opportunity when her guardian’s back was turned, and pressed 
a kiss on Eugene’s forehead, feeling all the joy that this 

stolen pleasure could give her. Then she looked round the 

room, and gathering up, as it were, into one single thought, 
all the untold bliss of that day, she made a picture of her 
memories, and dwelt upon it until she slept, the happiest 
creature in Paris. 

That evening’s merrymaking, in the course of which Vau- 
trin had given the drugged wine to Eugene and Father Goriot, 
was his own ruin. Bianchon, flustered with wine, forgot to 
open the subject of Trompe-la-Mort with Mile. Michonneau. 
The mere mention of the name would have set Vautrin on 
his guard ; for Vautrin, or, to give him his real name, Jacques 
Collin, was in fact the notorious escaped convict. 

But it was the joke about the Venus of P^re-Lachaise that 
finally decided his fate. Mile. Michonneau had very nearly 
made up her mind to warn the convict and to throw herself 
on his generosity, with the idea of making a better bargain 
for herself by helping him to escape that night ; but as'it was, 
she went out escorted by Poiret in search of the famous chief 
of detectives in the Petite Rue Saint-Anne, still thinking 


200 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


that it was the district superintendent — one Gondureau — with 
whom she had to do. The head of the department received 
his visitors courteously. There was a little talk, and the details 
were definitely arranged. Mile. Michonneau asked for the 
draught that she was to administer in order to set about her 
investigation. But the great man’s evident satisfaction set 
Mile. Michonneau thinking; and she began to see that this 
business involved something more than the mere capture of a 
runaway convict. She racked her brains while he looked in 
a drawer in his desk for the little phial, and it dawned upon 
her that in consequence of the treacherous revelations made 
by the prisoners the police were hoping to lay their hands 
on a considerable sum of money. But on hinting her suspi- 
cions to the old fox of the Petite Rue Saint-Anne, that officer 
began to smile, and tried to put her off the scent. 

“A delusion,” he said. “Collin’s sorbonne is the most 
dangerous that has yet been found among the dangerous 
classes. That is all, and the rascals are quite aware of it. 
They rally round him ; he is the backbone of the federation, 
its Bonaparte, in short ; he is very popular with them all. 
The rogue will never leave his chump in the Place de Greve.” 

As Mile. Michonneau seemed mystified, Gondureau ex- 
plained the two slang words for her benefit. Sorbonne and 
chump are two forcible expressions borrowed from thieves’ 
Latin, thieves, of all people, being compelled to consider 
the human head in its two aspects. A sorbonne is the head 
of a living man, his faculty of thinking — his council; a chump 
is a contemptuous epithet that implies how little a human 
head is worth after the axe has done its work. 

“Collin is playing us off,” he continued. “When we 
come across a man like a bar of steel tempered in the English 
fashion, there is always one resource left — we can kill him if 
he takes it into his head to make the least resistance. We are 
reckoning on several methods of killing Collin to-morrow 
morning. It saves a trial, and society is rid of him without 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


201 


all the expense of guarding and feeding him. What with 
getting up the case, summoning witnesses, paying their ex- 
penses, and carrying out the sentence, it costs a lot to go 
through all the proper formalities before you can get quit of 
one of these good-for-nothings, over and above the three 
thousand francs that you are going to have. There is a sav- 
ing in time as well. One good thrust of the bayonet into 
Trompe-la-Mort’s paunch will prevent scores of crimes, and 
save fifty scoundrels from following his example ; they will 
be very careful to keep themselves out of the police courts. 
That is doing the work of the police thoroughly, and true 
philanthropists will tell you that it is better to prevent crime 
than to punish it.” 

“ And you do a service to our country,” said Poiret. 

“ Really, you are talking in a very sensible manner to-night, 
that you are,” said the head of the department. “Yes, of 
course, we are serving our country, and we are very hardly 
used too. We do society very great services that are not 
recognized. In fact, a superior man must rise above vulgar 
prejudices, and a Christian must resign himself to the mishaps 
that doing right entails, when right is done in an out-of-the- 
way style. Paris is Paris, you see ! That is the explanation 
of my life. I have the honor to wish you a good-evening, 
mademoiselle. I shall bring my men to the Jardin du Roi 
in the morning. Send Christophe to the Rue du Buffon, tell 
him to ask for M. Gondureau in the house where you saw me 
before. Your servant, sir. If you should ever have anything 
stolen from you, come to me, and I will do my best to get it 
back for you.” 

“ Well, now,” Poiret remarked to Mile. Michonneau, “there 
are idiots who are scared out of their wits by the word police. 
That was a very pleasant-spoken gentleman, and what he wants 
you to do is as easy as saying ‘ Good-day.’ ” 

The next day was destined to be one of the most extraor- 


202 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


dinary in the annals of the Maison Vauquer. Hitherto the 
most startling occurrence in its tranquil existence had been 
the portentous, meteor-like apparition of the sham Comtesse 
de l’Ambermesnil. But the catastrophes of this great day 
were to cast all previous events into the shade, and supply an 
inexhaustible topic of conversation for Mme. Vauquer and her 
boarders so long as she lived. 

In the first place, Goriot and Eugene de Rastignac both 
slept until close upon eleven o’clock. Mme. Vauquer, who 
came home about midnight from the Gaite lay abed till half- 
past ten. Christophe, after a prolonged slumber (he had 
finished Vautrin’s first bottle of wine), was behindhand with 
his work, but Poiret and Mile. Michonneau uttered no com- 
plaint, though breakfast was delayed. As for Victorine and 
Mme. Couture, they also lay late. Vautrin went out before 
eight o’clock, and only came back just as breakfast was ready. 
Nobody protested, therefore, when Sylvie and Christophe 
went up at a quarter-past eleven, knocked at all the doors, 
and announced that breakfast was waiting. While Sylvie and 
the man were upstairs, Mile. Michonneau, who came down first, 
poured the contents of the phial into the silver cup belonging 
to Vautrin — it was standing with the others in the bain-marie 
that kept the cream hot for the morning coffee. The spinster 
had reckoned on this custom of the house to do her stroke of 
business. The seven lodgers were at last collected together, 
not without some difficulty. Just as Eugene came downstairs, 
stretching himself and yawning, a commissionaire handed 
him a letter from Mme. de Nucingen. It ran thus: 

“ I feel neither false vanity nor anger where you are con- 
cerned, my friend. Till two o’clock this morning I waited 
for you. Oh, that waiting for one whom you love ! No one 
that had passed through that torture could inflict it on another. 
I know now that you could have never loved before. What 
can have happened? Anxiety has taken hold of me. I 


FATHER GO RIOT 


203 


would have come myself to find out what had happened, if 
I had not feared to betray the secrets of my heart ? How 
can I walk or drive out at this time of day? Would it 
not be ruin ? I have felt to the full how wretched it is to 
be a woman. Send a word to reassure me, and explain 
how it is that you have not come after what my father told 
you. I shall be angry, but I will forgive you. One word, 
for pity’s sake. You will come to me very soon, will you not ? 
If you are busy, a word will be enough. Say, ‘ I will hasten 
to you,’ or else ‘ I am ill.’ But if you were ill my father 
would have come immediately to tell me so. What can have 
happened ? ” 

“Yes, indeed, what has happened?” exclaimed Eugene, 
and, hurrying down to the dining-room, he crumpled up the 
letter without reading any more. “ What time is it ? ” 

“ Half-past eleven,” said Vautrin, dropping a lump of sugar 
into his coffee. 

The escaped convict cast a glance at Eugene, a cold and 
fascinating glance ; men gifted with this magnetic power can 
quell furious lunatics in a madhouse by such a glance, it is 
said. Eugene shook in every limb. There was the sound of 
wheels in the street, and in another moment a man with a 
scared face rushed into the room. It was one of M. Taille- 
fer’s servants ; Mme. Couture recognized the livery at once. 

“ Mademoiselle,” he cried, “ your father is asking for you 
— something terrible has happened ! M. Frederic has had a 
sword thrust in the forehead in a duel, and the doctors have 
given him up. You will scarcely be in time to say good-by 
to him ! he is unconscious.” 

“ Poor young fellow ! ”. exclaimed Vautrin. “ How can 
people brawl when they have a certain income of thirty thou- 
sand livres ? Young people have bad manners, and that is a 
fact.” 

“ Sir ! ” cried Eugene. 


204 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


“ Well, what then, you big baby ! ” said Vautrin, swallow- 
ing down his coffee imperturbably, an operation which Mile. 
Michonneau watched with such close attention that she had 
no emotion to spare for the dreadful news that had struck the 
others dumb with amazement. “Are there not duels every 
morning in Paris?” added Vautrin, with the utmost calmness 
and deliberation. 

“ I will go with you, Victorine,” said Mme. Couture, and 
the two women hurried away at once without either hats or 
shawls. But before she went, Victorine, with her eyes full of 
tears, gave Eugene a glance that said — “ How little I thought 
that our happiness should cost me tears ! ” 

“Dear me, you are a prophet, M. Vautrin,” said Mme. 
Vauquer. 

“ I am all sorts of things,” said Vautrin. 

“Queer, isn’t it?” said Mme. Vauquer, stringing together 
a succession of commonplaces suited to the occasion. “ Death 
takes us off without asking us about it. The young often go 
before the old. It is a lucky thing for us women that we are 
not liable to fight duels, but we have other complaints that 
men don’t suffer from. We bear children, and it takes a 
long time to get over it. What a windfall for Victorine ! 
Her father will have to acknowledge her now ! ” 

“There!” said Vautrin, looking at Eugene, “yesterday 
she had not a penny ; this morning she has several millions to 
her fortune.” 

“I say, M. Eugene!” cried Mme. Vauquer, “you have 
landed on your feet ! ” 

At this exclamation^ Father Goriot looked at the student, 
and saw the crumpled letter still in his hand. 

“ You have not read it through 1 What does this mean ? 
Are you going to be like the rest of them ? ” he asked. 

“ Madame, I shall never marry Mile. Victorine,” said 
Eugene, turning to Mme. Vauquer with an expression of 
terror and loathing that surprised the onlookers at this scene. 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


205 


Father Goriot caught the student’s hand and grasped it 
warmly. He could have kissed it. 

“ Oh, ho ! ” said Vautrin, “ the Italians have a good pro- 
verb — Col tnnpo. ’ ’ 

“Is there any answer?” said Mme. de Nucingen’s mes- 
senger, addressing Eugene. 

“ Say that I will come directly.” 

The man went. Eugene was in a state of such violent ex- 
citement that he could not be prudent. 

“What is to be done?” he exclaimed aloud. “There 
are no proofs ! ’ ’ 

Vautrin began to smile. Though the drug he had taken 
was doing its work, the convict was so vigorous that he rose 
to his feet, gave Rastignac a look, and said in hollow tones, 
“ Luck comes to us while we sleep, young man,” and fell stiff 
and stark, as if he were struck dead. 

“ So there is a Divine justice ! ” said Eugene. 

“Well, if ever! What has come to that poor dear M. 
Vautrin ? ” 

“ A stroke ! ” cried Mile. Michonneau. 

“Here, Sylvie! girl, run for the doctor,” called the 
widow. “ Oh, M. Rastignac, just go for M. Bianchon, and be 
as quick as you can ; Sylvie might not be in time to catch our 
doctor, M. Grimprel.” 

Rastignac was glad of an excuse to leave that den of 
horrors, his departure for the doctor was nothing less than 
a hurried flight. 

“ Here, Christophe, go round to the chemist's and ask for 
something that’s good for the apoplexy.” 

Christophe likewise went. 

“ Father Goriot, just help us to get him upstairs.” 

Vautrin was taken up among them, carried carefully up the 
narrow staircase, and laid upon his bed. 

“ I can do no good here, so I shall go to see my daughter,” 
said M. Goriot. 


206 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


“Selfish old thing! ” cried Mme. Vauquer. “Yes, go; I 
wish you may die like a dog.” 

“Just go and see if you can find some ether,” said Mile. 
Michonneau to Mme. Vauquer; the former, with some help 
from Poiret, had unfastened the sick man’s clothes. 

Mme. Vauquer went down to her room, and left Mile. 
Michonneau mistress of the situation. 

“ Now ! just pull down his shirt and turn him over, quick ! 
You might be of some use in sparing my modesty,” she said 
to Poiret, “instead of standing there like a stock.” 

Vautrin was turned over ; Mile. Michonneau gave his 
shoulder a sharp slap, and the two portentous letters appeared, 
white against the red. 

“There, you have earned your three thousand francs very 
easily,” exclaimed Poiret, supporting Vautrin while Mile. 
Michonneau slipped on the shirt again. “ Oh ! how heavy 
he is,” he added, as he laid the convict down. 

“ Hush ! Suppose there is a strong box here ! ” said the 
old maid briskly ; her glances seemed to pierce the walls, she 
scrutinized every article of the furniture with greedy eyes. 
“ Could we find some excuse for opening that desk? ” 

“It mightn’t be quite right,” responded Poiret to this. 

“ Where is the harm? It is money stolen from all sorts of 
people, so it doesn’t belong to any one now. But we haven’t 
time, there is the Vauquer.” 

“Here is the ether,” said that lady. “I must say that 
this is an eventful day. Lord ! that man can’t have had a 
stroke; he is as white as curds.” 

“ White as curds ? ” echoed Poiret. 

“ And his pulse is steady,” said the widow, laying her hand 
on his breast. 

“ Steady? ” said the astonished Poiret. 

“ He is all right.” 

“ Do you think so ? ” asked Poiret. 

“ Lord ! Yes, he looks as if he were sleeping. Sylvie has 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


207 


gone for a doctor. I say, Mile. Michonneau, he is sniffing 
the ether. Pooh ! it is only a spasm. His pulse is good. 
He is as strong as a Turk. Just look, mademoiselle, what a 
fur tippet he has on his chest ; that is the sort of man to live 
till he is a hundred. His wig holds on tightly, however. 
Dear me ! it is glued on, and his own hair is red ; that is why 
he wears a wig. They always say that red-haired people are 
either the worst or the best. Is he one of the good ones, I 
wonder ! ” 

‘‘Good to hang,” said Poiret. 

“Round a pretty woman’s neck, you mean,” said Mile. 
Michonneau, hastily. “Just go away, M. Poiret. It is a 
woman’s duty to nurse you men when you are ill. Besides, 
for all the good you are doing, you may as well take yourself 
off,” she added. “ Mme. Vauquer and I will take great care 
of dear M. Vautrin.” 

Poiret went out on tiptoe without a murmur, like a dog 
kicked out of the room by his master. 

Rastignac had gone out for the sake of physical exertion ; 
he wanted to breathe the air, he felt stifled. Yesterday even- 
ing he had meant to prevent the murder arranged for half-past 
eight that morning. What had happened ? What ought he 
to do now ? He trembled to think that he himself might 
be implicated. Vautrin’s coolness still further dismayed him. 

“ Yet, how if Vautrin should die without saying a word? ” 
Rastignac asked himself. 

He hurried along the alleys of the Luxembourg Gardens as 
if the hounds of justice were after him, and he already 
heard the baying of the pack. 

“Well,” shouted Bianchon, “have you seen the Pilote ?” 

The Pilote was a Radical sheet, edited by M. Tissot. It 
came out several hours later than the morning papers, and 
was meant for the benefit of country subscribers ; for it 
brought the morning’s news into provincial districts twenty- 
four hours sooner than the ordinary local journals. 


208 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


“There is a wonderful history in it,” said the house student 
of the Hopital Cochin. “ Young Taillefer called out Count 
Franchessini, of the Old Guard, and the Count put a couple 
of inches of steel into his forehead. And here is little Victo- 
rine one of the richest heiresses in Paris ! If we had known 
that, eh ? What a game of chance death is ! They said 
Victorine was sweet on you ; was there any truth in it ? ” 

“Shut up, Bianchon ; I shall never marry her. I am 
in love with a charming woman, and she is in love with 
me, so ” 

“ You said that as if you were screwing yourself up to 
be faithful to her. I should like to see the woman worth 
the sacrifice of Master Taillefer’s money !” 

“Are all the devils of hell at my heels,” cried Rastignac. 

“ What is the matter with you ? Are you mad ? Give us 
your hand,” said Bianchon, “and let me feel your pulse. 
You are feverish.” 

“Just go to Mother Vauquer’s,” said Rastignac; “that 
scoundrel Vautrin has dropped down like one dead.” 

“Aha! ” said Bianchon, leaving Rastignac to his reflec- 
tions, “ you confirm my suspicions, and now I mean to make 
sure for myself.” 

The law-student’s long walk was a memorable one for him. 
He made in some way a survey of his conscience. After a 
close scrutiny, after hesitation and self-examination, his honor 
at any rate came out scathless from this sharp and terrible 
ordeal, like a bar of iron tested in the English fashion. He 
remembered Father Goriot’s confidences of the evening 
before ; he recollected the rooms taken for him in the Rue 
d’Artois, so that he might be near Delphine ; and then he 
thought of his letter, and read it again and kissed it. 

“Such a love is my anchor of safety,” he said to him- 
self. “How the old man’s heart must have been wrung! 
He says nothing about all that he has been through ; but 
who could not guess? Well, then, I will be like a son to 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


209 


him ; his life shall be made happy. If she cares for me, she 
will often come to spend the day with him. That grand 
Comtesse de Restaud is a heartless thing ; she would turn 
her father into her hall porter. Dear Delphine ! she is 
kinder to the old man ; she is worthy to be loved. Ah ! this 
evening I shall be very happy ! ” 

He took out his watch and admired it. 

“ I have had nothing but success ! If two people mean to 
love each other for ever, they may help each other, and I can 
take this. Besides, I shall succeed, and I will repay her a 
hundredfold. There is nothing criminal in this liaison; 
nothing that could cause the most austere moralist to frown. 
How many respectable people contract similar unions ! We 
deceive nobody ; it is deception that makes a position humili- 
ating. If you lie, you lower yourself at once. She and her 
husband have lived apart for a long while. Besides, how if I 
called upon that Alsatian to resign a wife whom he cannot 
make happy ? ’ ’ 

Rastignac’s battle with himself went on for a long while; 
and though the scruples of youth inevitably gained the day, 
an irresistible curiosity led him, about half-past four, to return 
to the Maison Vauquer through the gathering dusk. 

Bianchon had given Vautrin an emetic, reserving the con- 
tents of the stomach for chemical analysis at the hospital. 
Mile. Michonneau’s officious alacrity had still further strength- 
ened his suspicions of her. Vautrin, moreover, had recovered 
so quickly that it was impossible not to suspect some plot 
against the leader of all frolics at the lodging-house. Vautrin 
was standing in front of the stove in the dining-room when 
Rastignac came in. All the lodgers were assembled sooner 
than usual by the news of young Taillefer’s duel. They were 
anxious to hear any detail about the affair, and to talk over 
the probable change in Victorine’s prospects. Father Goriot 
alone was absent, but the rest were chatting. No sooner did 
Eugene come into the room, than his eyes met the inscrutable 
14 


210 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


gaze of Vautrin. It was the same look that had read his 
thoughts before — the look that had such power to waken evil 
thoughts in his heart. He shuddered. 

“ Well, dear boy,” said the escaped convict, “ I am likely 
to cheat death for a good while yet. According to these 
ladies, I have had a stroke that would have felled an ox, and 
come off with flying colors.” 

“ A bull you might say,” cried the widow. 

“You really might be sorry to see me still alive,” said 
Vautrin in Rastignac’s ear, thinking that he guessed the stu- 
dent’s thoughts. “You must be mighty sure of yourself.” 

“ Mile. Michonneau was talking the day before yesterday 
about a gentleman nicknamed Trompc-la-Mort ,” said Bian- 
chon ; “ and, upon my word, that name would do very well 
for you.” 

Vautrin seemed thunderstruck. He turned pale, and stag- 
gered back. He turned his magnetic glance, like a ray of 
vivid light, on Mile. Michonneau ; the old maid shrank and 
trembled under the influence of that strong will, and collapsed 
into a chair. The mask of good-nature had dropped from 
the convict’s face; from the unmistakable ferocity of that 
sinister look, Poiret felt that the old maid was in danger, and 
hastily stepped between them. None of the lodgers under- 
stood this scene in the least, they looked on in mute amaze- 
ment. There was a pause. Just then there was a sound of 
tramping feet outside ; there were soldiers there, it seemed, 
for there was a ring of several rifles on the pavement of the 
street. Collin was mechanically looking round the walls for 
a way of escape, when four men entered by way of the sitting- 
room. 

“In the name of the king and the law ! ” said an officer, 
but the words were almost lost in a murmur of astonishment. 

Silence fell on the room. The lodgers made way for three 
of the men, who had each a hand on a cocked pistol in a side 
pocket. Two policemen, who followed the detectives, kept 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


211 


the entrance to the sitting-room, and two more appeared in 
the doorway that gave access to the staircase. A sound of 
footsteps came from the garden, and again the rifles of several 
soldiers rang on the cobble-stones under the window. All 
chance of salvation by flight was cut off for Trompe-la-Mort, to 
whom all eyes instinctively turned. The chief walked straight 
up to him, and commenced operations by giving him a sharp 
blow on the head, so that the wig fell off, and Collin’s face 
was revealed in all its ugliness. There was a terrible sugges- 
tion of strength mingled with cunning in the short, brick-red 
crop of hair, the whole head was in harmony with his power- 
ful frame, and at that moment the fires of hell seemed to 
gleam from his eyes. In that flash the real Vautrin shone 
forth, revealed at once before them all ; they understood his 
past, his present, and future, his pitiless doctrines, his actions, 
the religion of his own good pleasure, the majesty with which 
his cynicism and contempt for mankind invested him, the 
physical strength of an organization proof against all trials. 
The blood flew to his face, and his eyes glared like the eyes 
of a wildcat. He started back with savage energy and a 
fierce growl which drew exclamations of alarm from the 
lodgers. At that leonine start the police caught at their 
pistols under cover of the general clamor. Collin saw the 
gleaming muzzles of the weapons, saw his danger, and in- 
stantly gave proof of a power of the highest order. There was 
something horrible and majestic in the spectacle of the sudden 
transformation in his face; he could only be compared to a 
caldron full of the steam that can send mountains flying, a 
terrific force dispelled in a moment by a drop of cold water. 
The drop of water that cooled his wrathful fury was a reflec- 
tion that flashed across his brain like lightning. He began 
to smile, and looked down at his wig. 

“ You are not in the politest of humors to-day,” he re- 
marked to the chief, and he held out his hands to the police- 
men with a jerk of his head. 


212 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


“Gentlemen,” he said, “put on the bracelets or the hand- 
cuffs. I call on those present to witness that I make no 
resistance.” 

A murmur of admiration ran through the room at the sud- 
den outpouring like fire and lava flood from this human 
volcano, and its equally sudden cessation. 

“ There’s a sell for you, master crusher,” the convict added, 
looking at the famous director of police. 

“Come, strip!” said he of the Petite Rue Saint-Anne, 
contemptuously. 

“Why?” asked Collin. “There are ladies present; I 
deny nothing, and surrender.” 

He paused, and looked round the room like an orator who 
is about to overwhelm his audience. 

“ Take this down, Daddy Lachapelle,” he went on, address- 
ing a little, white-haired old man who had seated himself at 
the end of the table ; and, after drawing a printed form from 
a portfolio, was proceeding to draw up a document. “I 
acknowledge myself to be Jacques Collin, otherwise known 
as Trompe-la-Mort, condemned to twenty years’ penal servi- 
tude, and I have just proved that I have come fairly by my 
nickname. If I had as much as raised my hand,” he went 
on, addressing the other lodgers, “ those three sneaking 
wretches yonder would have drawn claret on Mamma Vau- 
quer’s domestic hearth. The rogues have laid their heads 
together to set a trap for me.” 

Mme. Vauquer felt sick and faint at these words. 

“Good Lord! ” she cried, “this does give one a turn; 
and me at the Galt£ with him only last night ! ” she said to 
Sylvie. 

“Summon your philosophy, mamma,” Collin resumed. 
“ Is it a misfortune to have sat in my box at the Galte yester- 
day evening? After all, are you better than we are? The 
brand upon our shoulders is less shameful than the brand set 
on your hearts, you flabby members of a society rotten to the 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


213 


core. Not the best man among you could stand up to me." 
His eyes rested upon Rastignac, to whom he spoke with a 
pleasant smile that seemed strangely at variance with the 
savage expression in his eyes. “ Our little bargain still holds 
good, dear boy ; you can accept any time you like ! Do you 
understand ? ” And he sang — 

“A charming girl is my Fanchettc 
In her simplicity. ’ ’ 

“ Don't you trouble yourself," he went on ; “ 1 can get in 

my money. They are too much afraid of me to swindle 

„ ^ > } 
me. 

The convicts’ prison, its language and customs, its sudden 
sharp transitions from the humorous to the horrible, its ap- 
palling grandeur, its triviality and its dark depths, were all 
revealed in turn by the speaker’s discourse; he seemed to 
be no longer a man, but the type and mouthpiece of a degen- 
erate race, a brutal, supple, clear-headed race of savages. In 
one moment Collin became the poet of an inferno, wherein 
all thoughts and passions that move human nature (save re- 
pentance) find a place. He looked about him like a fallen 
archangel who is for war to the end. Rastignac lowered his 
eyes, and acknowledged this kinship claimed by crime as an 
expiation of his own evil thoughts. 

“Who betrayed me?" said Collin, and his terrible eyes 
traveled round the room. Suddenly they rested on Mile. 
Michonneau. 

“It was you, old cat! " he said. “That sham stroke of 

apoplexy was your doing, lynx-eyes ! Two words from 

me, and your throat would be cut in less than a week, but I 
forgive you, I am a Christian. You did not sell me either. 

But who did? Aha! you may rummage upstairs,’’ he 

shouted, hearing the police officers opening his cupboards 
and taking possession of his effects. “ The nest is empty, 
the birds flew away yesterday, and you will be none the wiser. 


214 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


My ledgers are here,” he said, tapping his forehead. “ Now 
I know who sold me ! It could only be that blackguard Fil- 
de-Soie. That is who it was, old catchpoll, eh?” he said, 
turning to the chief. “ It was timed so neatly to get the 
bank-notes up above there. There is nothing left for you — 
spies ! As for Fil-de-Soie, he will be under the daisies in less 
than a fortnight, even if you were to tell off the whole force 
to protect him. How much did you give the Michonneau ? ” 
he asked of the police officers. “A thousand crowns? Oh 
you Ninon in decay, Pompadour in tatters, Venus of the 
graveyard, I was worth more than that ! If you had given 
me warning, you should have had six thousand francs. Ah ! 
you had no suspicion of that, old trafficker in flesh and blood, 
or I should have had the preference. Yes, I would have given 
six thousand francs to save myself an inconvenient journey and 
some loss of money,” he said, as they fastened the handcuffs 
on his wrists. “ These folks will amuse themselves by drag- 
ging out this business till the end of time to keep me idle ! 
If they were to send me straight to jail, I should soon be 
back at my old tricks in spite of the duffers at the Quai des 
Orfevres. Down yonder they would all turn themselves inside 
out to help their general — their good Trompe-la-Mort — to get 
clear away. Is there a single one among you that can say as 
I can, that he has ten thousand brothers ready to do anything 
for him ? ” he asked proudly. “ There is some good there,” 
he said, tapping his heart ; “ I have never betrayed any one ! 
Look you here, you slut,” he said to the old maid, “ they are 
all afraid of me, do you see ? but the sight of you turns them 
sick. Rake in your gains.” 

He was silent for a moment, and looked round at the lodg- 
ers’ faces. 

“ What dolts you are, all of you ! Have you never seen a 
convict before ? A convict of Collin’s stamp, whom you see 
before you, is a man less weak-kneed than others ; he lifts up 
his voice against the colossal fraud of the social contract. 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


215 


as Jean Jacques did, whose pupil he is proud to declare him- 
self. In short, I stand here single-handed against a govern- 
ment and a whole subsidized machinery of tribunals and 
police, and I am a match for them alL ,, 

“ Ye gods ! ” cried the painter, “ what a magnificent sketch 
one might make of him ! ” 

“ Look here, you gentlemen-in-waiting to his highness the 
gibbet, master of ceremonies to the widow ” (a nickname full 
of sombre poetry, given by prisoners to the guillotine), “ be 
a good-fellow, and tell me if it really was Fil-de-Soie who sold 
me. I don’t want him to suffer for some one else, that would 
not be fair.” 

But before the chief had time to answer, the rest of the 
party returned from making their investigations upstairs. 
Everything had been opened and inventoried. A few words 
passed between them and the chief, and the official prelimin- 
aries were complete. 

“ Gentlemen,” said Collin, addressing the lodgers, “ they 
will take me away directly. You have all made my stay among 
you very agreeable, and I shall look back upon it with grati- 
tude. Receive my adieux, and permit me to send you figs 
from Provence.” 

He advanced a step or two, and then turned to look once 
more at Rastignac. 

“ Good-by, Eugene,” he said, in a sad and gentle tone, a 
strange transition from his previous rough and stern manner. 
“ If you should be hard up, I have left you a devoted friend,” 
and, in spite of his shackles, he managed to assume a posture 
of defense, called, “ One ! two ! ” like a fencing-master, and 
lunged. “ If anything goes wrong, apply in that quarter. 
Man and money, all at your service.” 

The speaker’s strange manner was sufficiently burlesque, so 
that no one but Rastignac knew that there was a serious mean- 
ing underlying the pantomime. 

As soon as the police, soldiers, and detectives had left the 

H 


216 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


house, Sylvie, who was rubbing her mistress* temples with 
vinegar, looked round at the bewildered lodgers. 

“ Well,” said she, “ he was a man, he was, for all that.” 

Her words broke the spell. Every one had been too much 
excited, too much moved by very various feelings to speak. 
But now the lodgers began to look at each other, and then all 
eyes were turned at once on Mile. Michonneau, a thin, shriv- 
eled, dead-alive, mummy-like figure crouching by the stove ; 
her eyes were downcast, as if she feared that the green eye- 
shade could not shut out the expression of those faces from 
her. This figure and the feeling of repulsion she had so long 
excited were explained all at once. A smothered murmur 
filled the room ; it was so unanimous that it seemed as if the 
same feeling of loathing had pitched ail the voices in one key. 
Mile. Michonneau heard it, and did not stir. It was Bianchon 
who was the first to move ; he bent over his neighbor, and 
said in a low voice, “ If that creature is going to stop here, 
and have dinner with us, I shall clear out.” 

In the twinkling of an eye it was clear that every one in 
the room, save Poiret, was of the medical student’s opinion, 
so that the latter, strong in the support of the majority, went 
up to that elderly person. 

“You are more intimate with Mile. Michonneau than the 
rest of us,” he said; “speak to her, make her understand 
that she must go, and go at once,” showing by his manner a 
most determined spirit. 

“At once ! ” echoed Poiret in amazement. 

Then he went across to the crouching figure, and spoke a 
few words in her ear. 

“ I have paid beforehand for the quarter ; I have as much 
right to be here as any one else,” she said, with a viperous 
look at the boarders. 

“ Never mind that ! we will club together and pay you the 
money back,” said Rastignac. 

"Monsieur is taking Collin’s part,” she said, with a ques- 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


217 


tioning, malignant glance at the law student; “ it is not diffi- 
cult to guess why.” 

Eugene started forward at the words, as if he meant to 
spring upon her and wring her neck. That glance, and the 
depths of treachery that it revealed, had been a hideous en- 
lightenment. 

“ Let her alone ! ” cried the boarders. 

Rastignac folded his arms, and was silent. 

“Let us have no more of Mile. Judas,” said the painter, 
turning to Mme. Vauquer. “ If you don’t show the Michon- 
neau the door, madame, we shall all leave your shop, and 
wherever we go we shall say that there are only convicts and 
spies left there. If you do the other thing, we will hold our 
tongues about the business; for when all is said and done, it 
might happen in the best society until they brand them on the 
forehead, when they send them to the hulks. They ought not 
to let convicts go about Paris disguised like decent citizens, 
so as to carry on their antics like a set of rascally humbugs, 
which they are.” 

At this Mme. Vauquer recovered miraculously. She sat up 
and folded her arms ; her eyes were wide open now, and 
there was no sign of tears in them. 

“ Why, do you really mean to be the ruin of my establish- 
ment, my dear sir? There is M. Vautrin Goodness,” 

she cried, interrupting herself, “ I can’t help calling him by 
the name he passed himself off by for an honest man ! There 
is one room to let already, and you want me to turn out two 
more lodgers in the middle of the season, when no one is 
moving ” 

“ Gentlemen, let us take our hats and go and dine at Flico- 
teaux’s in the Place Sorbonne,” cried Bianchon. 

Mme. Vauquer glanced round, and saw in a moment on 
which side her interest lay. She waddled across to Mile. 
Michonneau. 

“ Come., now.” she said • “you would not be the ruin of 


218 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


my establishment, would you, eh ? There’s a dear, kind soul. 
You see what a pass these gentlemen have brought me to; 
just go up to your room for this evening.” 

“ Never a bit of it ! ” cried the boarders. “ She must go, 
and go this minute ! ” 

“ But the poor lady has had no dinner,” said Poiret, with 
piteous entreaty. 

“She can go and dine where she likes,” shouted several 
voices. 

“ Turn her out, the spy ! ” 

“ Turn them both out ! Spies ! ” 

“ Gentlemen,” cried Poiret, his head swelling with the 
courage that love gives to the ovine male, “ respect the 
weaker sex.” 

“ Spies are of no sex ! ” said the painter. 

“ A precious sexorama ! ” 

“ Turn her into the streetorama ! ” 

“ Gentlemen, this is not manners ! If you turn people 
out of the house, it ought not to be done so unceremoniously 
and with no notice at all. We have paid our money, and we 
are not going,” said Poiret, putting on his cap, and taking a 
chair beside Mile. Michonneau, with whom Mme. Vauquer 
was remonstrating. 

“Naughty boy!” said the painter, with a comical look; 
“run away, naughty little boy ! ” 

“Look here,” said Bianchon ; “if you do not go, all the 
rest of us will,” and the boarders, to a man, made for the 
sitting-room door. 

“ Oh ! mademoiselle, what is to be done? ” cried Mme. 
Vauquer. “I am a ruined woman. You can’t stay here; 
they will go farther, do something violent.” 

Mile. Michonneau rose to her feet. 

“ She is going! She is not going! She is going ! No, 
she isn’t.” 

These alternate exclamations, and a suggestion of hostile 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


219 


intentions, borne out by the behavior of the insurgents, com- 
pelled Mile. Michonneau to take her departure. She made 
some stipulations, speaking in a low voice in her hostess’ ear, 
and then — “ I shall go to Mme. Buneaud’s,” she said, with a 
threatening look. 

“ Go where you please, mademoiselle,” said Mme. Vau- 
quer, who regarded this choice of an opposition establish- 
ment as an atrocious insult. “ Go and lodge with the 
Buneaud ; the wine would give a cat the colic, and the food 
is cheap and nasty.” 

The boarders stood aside in two rows to let her pass ; not a 
word was spoken. Poiret looked so wistfully after Mile. 
Michonneau, and so artlessly revealed that he was in two minds 
whether to go or stay, that the boarders, in their joy at being 
quit of Mile. Michonneau, burst out laughing at the sight of 
him. 

“ Hist ! — st ! — st ! Poiret,” shouted the painter. “ Hallo ! 
I say, Poiret, hallo ! ” The employe from the Museum began 
to sing — 

“ Partant pour la Syrie , 

Le jeune at beau Dunois ” 

“ Get along with you ; you must be dying to go, irahit sua 
quenique voluptas /” said Bianchon. 

“ Every one to his taste — free rendering from Virgil,” said 
the tutor. 

Mile. Michonneau made a movement as if to take Poiret’s 
arm, with an appealing glance that he could not resist. The 
two went out together, the old maid leaning upon him, and 
there was a burst of applause, followed by peals of laughter. 

“ Bravo, Poiret ! ” 

“ Who would have thought it of old Poiret ! ” 

“ Apollo Poiret ! ” 

“ Mars Poiret ! ” 

“ Intrepid Poiret ! M 


FATHER GO RIOT 


220 

A messenger came in at that moment with a letter for Mme. 
Vauquer, who read it through, and collapsed in her chair. 

“ The house might as well be burnt down at once,” cried 
she, “if there are to be any more of these thunderbolts! 
Young Taillefer died at three o’clock this afternoon. It serves 
me right for wishing well to those ladies at that poor young 
man’s expense. Mme. Couture and Victorine want me to 
send their things, because they are going to live with her 
hither. M. Taillefer allows his daughter to keep old Mme. 
Couture with her as lady companion. Four rooms to let ! and 
five lodgers gone ! ” 

She sat up, and seemed about to burst into tears. 

“ Bad luck has come to lodge here, I think,” she cried. 

Once more there came a sound of wheels from the street 
outside. 

“What! another windfall for somebody!” was Sylvie’s 
comment. 

But it was Goriot who came in, looking so radiant, so 
flushed with happiness, that he seemed to have grown young 
again. 

“Goriot in a cab!” cried the boarders; “the world is 
coming to an end.” 

The good soul made straight for Eugene, who was standing 
rapt in thought in a corner, and laid a hand on the young 
man’s arm. 

“ Come,” he said, with gladness in his eyes. 

“ Then you haven’t heard the news? ” said Eugene. “ Vau- 
trin was an escaped convict ; they have just arrested him ; 
and young Taillefer is dead.” 

“Very well, but what business is it of ours?” replied 
Father Goriot. “ I am going to dine with my daughter 
in your house , do you understand? She is expecting you. 
Come ! ” 

He carried off Rastignac with him by main force, and they 
departed in as great a hurry as a pair of eloping lovers. 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


221 


“Now, let us have dinner,” cried the painter, and every 
one drew his chair to the table. 

“ Well, I never? ” said the portly Sylvie. “ Nothing goes 
right to-day ! The haricot mutton has caught ! Bah ! you 
will have to eat it, burnt as it is, more’s the pity ! ” 

Mme. Vauquer was so dispirited that she could not say a word 
as she looked round the table and saw only ten people where 
eighteen should be ; but every one tried to comfort and cheer 
her. At first the dinner contingent, as was natural, talked 
about Vautrin and the day’s events ; but the conversation 
wound round to such topics of interest as duels, jails, justice, 
prison life, and alterations that ought to be made in the laws. 
They soon wandered miles away from Jacques Collin and 
Victorine and her brother. There might be only ten of 
th em, but they made noise enough for twenty ; indeed, there 
seemed to be more of them than usual ; that was the only 
difference between yesterday and to-day. Indifference to the 
fate of others is a matter of course in this selfish world, which, 
on the morrow of a tragedy, seeks among the events of Paris 
for a fresh sensation for its daily renewed appetite, and this 
indifference soon gained the upper hand. Mme. Vauquer 
herself grew calmer under the soothing influence of hope, 
and the mouthpiece of hope was the portly Sylvie. 

That day had gone by like a dream for Eugene, and the 
sense of unreality lasted into the evening; so that, in spite 
of his energetic character and clear-headedness, his ideas were 
a chaos as he sat beside Goriot in the cab. The old man’s 
voice was full of unwonted happiness, but Eugene had been 
shaken by so many emotions that the words sounded in his 
ears like works spoken in a dream. 

“ It was finished this morning ! All three of us are going 
to dine there together, together ! Do you understand ? I 
have not dined with my Delphine, my little Delphine, these 
four years, and I shall have her for a whole evening ! We 
have been at your lodging the whole time since morning. 


222 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


I have been working like a porter in my shirt sleeves, help- 
ing to carry in the furniture. Aha! you don’t know what 
pretty ways she has; at table she will look after me, ‘Here, 
papa, just try this, it is nice.’ And I shall not be able to eat. 
Oh, it is a long while since I have been with her in quiet 
every-day life as we shall have her.” 

“It really seems as if the world had been turned upside 
down.” 

“Upside down?” repeated Father Goriot. “Why, the 
world has never been so right-side up. I see none but smiling 
faces in the streets, people who shake hands cordially and 
embrace each other, people who all look as happy as if they 
were going to dine with their daughter, and gobble down a 
nice little dinner that she went with me to order of the chef at 
the Cafe des Anglais. But, pshaw ! with her beside you gall 
and wormwood would be as sweet as honey.” 

“I feel as if I were coming back to life again,” said 
Eugene. 

“ Why, hurry up there ! ” cried Father Goriot, letting down 
the window in front. “Get on faster; I will give you five 
francs if you get to the place I told you of in ten minutes’ 
time.” 

With this prospect before him the cabman crossed Paris 
with miraculous celerity. 

“ How that fellow crawls ! ” said Father Goriot. 

“ But where are you taking me?” Eugene asked him. 

“ To your own house,” said Goriot. 

The cab stopped in the Rue d’Artois. Father Goriot 
stepped out first and flung ten francs to the man with the 
recklessness of a widower returning to bachelor ways. 

“ Come along upstairs,” he said to Rastignac. They 
crossed a courtyard, and climbed up to the third floor of a 
new and handsome house. Here they stopped before a door ; 
but before Goriot could ring, it was opened by Th£rese, Mme. 
de Nucingen’s maid. Eugene found himself in a charming 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


223 


set of chambers ; an ante-room, a little drawing-room, a bed- 
room, and a study, looking out upon a garden. The furniture 
and the decoration of the little drawing-room were of the 
most daintily charming description, the room was full of soft 
light, and Delphine rose up from a low chair by the fire and 
stood before him. She set her fire-screen down on the 
chimney-piece, and spoke with tenderness in every tone of 
her voice. 

“So we had to go in search of you, sir, you who are so 
slow to understand ! ” 

Therese left the room. The student took Delphine in his 
arms and held her in a tight clasp, his eyes filled with tears 
of joy. This last contrast between his present surroundings 
and the scenes he had just witnessed was too much for Rastig- 
nac’s overwrought nerves, after the day’s strain and excite- 
ment that had wearied heart and brain ; he was almost 
overcome by it. 

“I felt sure myself that he loved you,” murmured Father 
Goriot, while Eugene lay back bewildered on the sofa, utterly 
unable to speak a word or to reason out how and why the 
magic wand had been waved to bring about this final trans- 
formation scene. 

“But you must see your rooms,” said Mme. de Nucingen. 
She took his hand and led him into a room carpeted and fur- 
nished like her own ; indeed, down to the smallest details, it 
was a reproduction in miniature of Delphine's own handsome 
apartment. 

“ There is no bed,” said Rastignac. 

“ No, monsieur,” she answered, reddening, and pressing 
his hand. Eugene, looking at her, understood, young though 
he yet was, how deeply modesty is implanted in the heart of 
a woman who loves. 

“ You are one of those beings whom we cannot choose but 
to adore for ever,” he said in her ear. “ Yes, the deeper and 
truer love is, the more mysterious and closely veiled it shouldi 


224 


FATHER GO RIOT 


be ; I can dare to say so, since we understand each other so 
well. No one shall learn our secret.” 

“Oh ! so I am nobody, I suppose,” growled the father. 

44 You know quite well that 4 we ’ means you.” 

“Ah ! that is what I wanted. You will not mind me, will 
you? I shall go and come like a good fairy who makes him- 
self felt everywhere without being seen, shall I not? Eh, 
Delphinette, Ninette, Dedel — was it not a good idea of mine 
to say to you, 4 There are some nice rooms to let in the Rue 
d’Artois ; let us furnish them for him ? ’ And she would not 
hear of it 1 Ah ! your happiness has been all my doing. I 
am the author of your happiness and of your existence. 
Fathers must always be giving if they would be happy them- 
selves ; always giving — they would not be fathers else.” 

44 Was that how it happened ? ” asked Eugene. 

“Yes. She would not listen to me. She was afraid that 
people would talk, as if the rubbish that they say about you 
were to be compared with happiness ! Why, all women dream 
of doing what she has done ” 

Father Goriot found himself without an audience, for Mine, 
de Nucingen had led Rastignac into the study ; he heard a 
kiss given and taken, low though the sound was. 

The study was furnished as elegantly as the other rooms, 
and nothing was wanting there. 

44 Have we guessed your wishes rightly?” she asked, as 
they returned to the drawing-room for dinner. 

44 Yes,” he said, 44 only too well, alas ! For all this luxury 
so well carried out, this realization of pleasant dreams, the 
elegance that satisfies all the romantic fancies of youth, 
appeals to me so strongly that I cannot but feel that it is my 
rightful possession, but I cannot accept it from you, and I am 
too poor as yet to ” 

44 Ah ! ah! you say me nay already,” she said with arch 
imperiousness, and a charming little pout of the lips, a 
woman’s way of laughing away scruples. 


FATHER GO RIOT 


225 


But Eugene had submitted so lately to that solemn self- 
questioning, and Vautrin’s arrest had so plainly shown him 
the depths of the pit that lay ready to his feet, that the 
instincts of generosity and honor had been strengthened in 
him, and he could not allow himself to be coaxed into aban- 
doning his high-minded determinations. Profound melancholy 
filled his mind. 

“ Do you really mean to refuse ? ” said Mme. de Nucingen. 
“And do you know what such a refusal means? That you 
are not sure of yourself, that you do not dare to bind yourself 
to me. Are you really afraid of betraying my affection ? If 
you love me, if I — love you, why should you shrink back 
from such a slight obligation ? If you but knew what a pleas- 
ure it has been to see after all the arrangements of this bachelor 
establishment, you would not hesitate any longer, you would 
ask me to forgive you for your hesitation. I had some money 
that belonged to you, and I have made good use of it, that is 
all. You mean this for magnanimity, but it is very little of 

you. You are asking me for far more than this Ah ! ” 

she cried (as Eugene’s passionate glance was turned on her), 
“ and you are making difficulties about the merest trifles. Oh, 
if you feel no love whatever for me, refuse, by all means. 
My fate hangs on a word from you. Speak ! Father,” she 
said after a pause, “make him listen to reason. Can he 
imagine that I am less nice than he is on the point of honor?” 

Father Goriot was looking on and listening to this pretty 
quarrel with a placid smile, as if he had found some balm for 
all the sorrows of life. 

“ Child that you are ! ” she cried again, catching Eugene’s 
hand. “ You are just beginning life ; you find barriers at the 
outset that many a man finds insurmountable; a woman’s 
hand opens the way, and you shrink back ! Why, you are 
sure to succeed ! You will have a brilliant future. Success 
is written on that broad forehead of yours, and will you not 
be able to repay me my loan of to-day ? Did not a lady in 
15 


226 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


olden times arm her knight with sword and helmet and coat 
of mail, and find him a charger, so that he might fight for her 
in the tournament ? Well, then, Eugene, these things that I 
offer you are the weapons of this age ; every one who means 
to be something must have such tools as these. A pretty 
place your garret must be if it is like papa’s room ! See, 
dinner is waiting all this time. Do you want to make me 
unhappy? Why don’t you answer?” she said, shaking his 
hand. “Mon Dieu ! papa, make up his mind for him, or I 
will go away and never see him any more.” 

“I will make up your mind,” said Goriot, coming down 
from the clouds. “Now, my dear M. Eugene, the next 
thing is to borrow money of the Jews, isn’t it ? ” 

“There is positively no help for it,” said Eugene. 

“All right, I will give you credit,” said the other, drawing 
out a cheap leather pocket-book, much the worse for wear. 
“ I have turned Jew myself ; I have paid for everything ; here 
are the invoices. You do not owe a penny for anything here. 
It did not come to very much — five thousand francs at most, 
and I am going to lend you the money myself. I am not a 
woman — you cannot refuse me. You shall give me a receipt 
on a scrap of paper, and you can return it some time or other.” 

Delphine and Eugene looked at each other in amazement, 
tears sprang to their eyes. Rastignac held out his hand and 
grasped Goriot’s warmly. 

“ Well, what is all this about ? Are you not my children ?” 

“Oh! my poor father,” said Mme. de Nucingen, “how 
did you do it ? ” 

“Ah ! now you ask me. When I made up my mind to 
move him nearer to you, and saw you buying things as if they 
were wedding presents, I said to myself, ‘ She will never be 
able to pay for them.’ The attorney says that those law pro- 
ceedings will last quite six months before your husband can be 
made to disgorge your fortune. Well and good. I sold out 
my property in the funds that brought in thirteen hundred and 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


227 


fifty livres a year, and bought a safe annuity of twelve hundred 
francs a year for fifteen thousand francs. Then I paid your 
tradesmen out of the rest of the capital. As for me, children, 
I have a room upstairs for which I pay fifty crowns a year ; I 
can live like a prince on two francs a day, and still have 
something left over. I shall not have to spend anything 
much on clothes, for I never wear anything out. This fort- 
night past I have been laughing in my sleeve, thinking to 
myself, ‘ How happy they are going to be ! ’ and — well, now, 
are you not happy? ” 

“Oh papa! papa!” cried Mme. de Nucingen, springing 
to her father, who took her on his knee. She covered him 
with kisses, her fair hair brushed his cheek, her tears fell on 
the withered face that had grown so bright and radiant. 

“Dear father, what a father you are! No, there is not 
another father like you under the sun. If Eugene loved you 
before, what must he feel for you now? ” 

“ Why, children ! why, Delphinette ! ” cried Goriot, who 
had not felt his daughter’s heart beat against his breast for ten 
years, “ do you want me to die of joy? My poor heart will 
break! Come, Monsieur Eugene, we are quits already.” 
And the old man strained her to his breast with such fierce 
and passionate force that she cried out. 

“ Oh ! you are hurting me ! ” she said. 

“Iam hurting you ! ” He grew pale at the words. The 
pain expressed in his face seemed greater than it is given to 
humanity to know. The agony of this Christ of paternity 
can only be compared with the masterpieces of those princes 
of the palette who have left for us the record of their visions 
of an agony suffered for a whole world by the Saviour of men. 
Father Goriot pressed his lips very gently against the waist 
that his fingers had grasped too roughly. 

“ Oh ! no, no,” he cried. “ I have not hurt you, have 
I?” and his smile seemed to repeat the question. “ You 
have hurt me with that cry just now. The things cost rather 


228 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


more than that,” he said in her ear, with another gentle kiss, 
“ but I had to deceive him about it, or he would have been 
angry.” 

Eugene sat dumb with amazement in the presence of this 
inexhaustible love \ he gazed at Goriot, and his face betrayed 
the artless admiration which shapes the beliefs of youth. 

“ I will be worthy of all this,” he cried. 

“ Oh ! my Eugene, that is nobly said,” and Mme. de 
Nucingen kissed the law student on the forehead. 

“ He gave up Mile. Taillefer and her millions for you,” 
said Father Goriot. “ Yes, the little thing was in love with 
you, and now that her brother is dead she is as rich as 
Croesus.” 

“Oh ! why did you tell her? ” cried Rastignac. 

“Eugene,” Delphine said in his ear, “I have one regret 
now this evening. Ah ! how I will love you ! and for ever ! ” 

“This is the happiest day I have had since you two became 
acquainted ! ” cried Goriot. “ God may send me any suffer- 
ing, so long as I do not suffer through you, and I can still say, 

‘ In this short month of February I had more happiness than 
other men have in their whole lives.’ Look at me, Fifine ! ” 
he said to his daughter. “ She is very beautiful, is she not? 
Tell me, now, have you seen many women with that pretty 
soft color — that little dimple of hers? No, I thought not. 
Ah, well, and but for me this lovely woman would never have 
been. And very soon happiness will make her a thousand 
times lovelier, happiness through you. I could give up my 
place in heaven to you, neighbor, if needs be, and go down 
to hell instead. Come, let us have dinner,” he added, 
scarcely knowing what he said, “everything is ours.” 

“ Poor dear father ! ” 

He rose and went over to her, and took her face in his 
hands, and set a kiss on the plaits of hair. “ If you only 
knew, little one, how happy you can make me — how little it 
takes to make me happy ! Will you come and see me some* 


FATHER COR JOT. 


229 


times? I shall be just above, so it is only a step. Promise 
me, say that you will ! ” 

“Yes, dear father.” 

“ Say it again.” 

“Yes, I will, my kind father.” 

“ Hush, hush ! I should make you say it a hundred times 
over if I followed my own wishes. Let us have dinner.” 

The three behaved like children that evening, and Father 
Goriot’s spirits were certainly not the least wild. He lay at 
his daughter’s feet, kissed them, gazed into her eyes, rubbed 
his head against her dress ; in short, no young lover could 
have been more extravagant or more tender. 

“You see!” Delphine said with a look at Eugene, “so 
long as my father is with us, he monopolizes me. He will be 
rather in the way sometimes.” 

Eugene had himself already felt certain twinges of jealousy, 
and could not blame this speech that contained the germ of 
all ingratitude. 

“And when will the rooms be ready?” asked Eugene, 
looking round. “We must all leave them this evening, I 
suppose.” 

“Yes, but to-morrow you must come and dine with me,” 
she answered, with an eloquent glance. “ It is our night at 
the Italiens.” 

“ I shall go to the pit,” said her father. 

It was midnight. Mme. de Nucingen’s carriage was wait- 
ing for her, and Father Goriot and the student walked back 
to the Maison Vauquer, talking of Delphine, and warming 
over their talk till there grew up a curious rivalry between the 
two violent passions. Eugene could not help seeing that the 
father’s selfish love was deeper and more steadfast than his 
own. For this worshiper Delphine was always pure and fair, 
and her father’s admiration drew its fervor from a whole past 
as well as a future of love. 

They found Mme. Vauquer by the stove, with Sylvie and 


230 


FATHER GO RIO 7: 


Christophe to keep her company; the old landlady, sitting 
like Marius among the ruins of Carthage, was waiting for the 
two lodgers that yet remained to her, and bemoaning her lot 
with the sympathetic Sylvie. Tasso’s lamentations as recorded 
in Byron’s poem are undoubtedly eloquent, but for sheer force 
of truth they fall far short of the widow’s cry from the depths. 

“ Only three cups of coffee in the morning, Sylvie ! Oh, 
dear ! to have your house emptied in this way is enough to 
break your heart. What is life, now my lodgers are gone? 
Nothing at all. Just think of it ! It is just as if all the furni- 
ture had been taken out of the house, and your furniture is 
your life. How have I offended heaven to draw down all this 
trouble upon me ? And haricot beans and potatoes laid in 
for twenty people ! The police in my house, too ! We shall 
have to live on potatoes now, and Christophe will have to go ! ” 

The Savoyard, who was fast asleep, suddenly woke up at 
this, and said, “ Madame?” questioningly. 

“ Poor fellow ! ” said Sylvie, “ he is like a dog.” 

“ In the dead season, too ! Nobody is moving now. I 
would like to know where the lodgers are to drop down from. 
It drives me distracted. And that old witch of a Michonneau 
goes and takes Poiret with her ! What can she have done to 
him to make him so fond of her? He runs about after her 
like a little dog.” 

“ Lord ! ” said Sylvie, flinging up her head, “ those old 
maids are up to all sorts of tricks.” 

‘‘There’s that poor M. Vautrin that they made out to be a 
convict,” the widow went on. “Well, you know that is too 
much for me, Sylvie ; I can’t bring myself to believe it. 
Such a lively man as he was, and paid fifteen francs a month 
for his coffee of an evening, paid you every penny on the nail 
too.” 

“ And open-handed he was ! ” said Christophe. 

“ There is some mistake,” said Sylvie. 

“Why, no there isn’t! he said so himself!” said Mme. 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


231 


Vauquer. “And to think that all these things have hap- 
pened in my house, and in a quarter where you never see 
a cat go by. On my word as an honest woman, it’s like a 
dream. For, look here, we saw Louis XVI. meet with his 
mishap ; we saw the fall of the Emperor ; and we saw him 
come back and fall again ; there was nothing out of the 
way in all that, but lodging-houses are not liable to revolu- 
tions. You can do without a king, but you must eat all the 
same ; and so long as a decent woman, a de Conflans born 
and bred, will give you all sorts of good things for dinner, 
nothing short of the end of the world ought to — but there, 
it is the end of the world, that is just what it is!” 

“And to think that Mile. Michonneau who made all 
this mischief is to have a thousand crowns a year for it, 
so I hear,” cried Sylvie. 

“ Don’t speak of her, she is a wicked woman ! ” said 
Mme. Vauquer. “ She is going to the Buneaud, who 
charges less than cost. But the Buneaud is capable of 
anything; she must have done frightful things, robbed and 
murdered people in her time. She ought to be put in jail for 
life instead of that poor dear ” 

Eugene and Goriot, reaching the Maison Vauquer, rang the 
door-bell at that moment. 

“ Ah ! here are my two faithful lodgers,” said the widow, 
sighing. 

But the two faithful lodgers, who retained but shadowy 
recollections of the misfortunes of their lodging-house, an- 
nounced to their hostess without more ado that they were 
about to remove to the Chaussee d’Antin. 

“ Sylvie ! ” cried the widow, “ this is the last straw. Gen- 
tlemen, this will be the death of me ! It has quite upset 
me ! There’s a weight on my chest ! I am ten years 
older for this day ! Upon my word, I shall go out of 
my senses 1 And what is to be done with the haricots? 
Oh, well, if I am to be left here all by myself, you shall 


232 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


go to-morrow, Christophe. Good-night, gentlemen,” and 
she went upstairs. 

“ What is the matter now ? ” Eugene inquired of Sylvie, in 
much astonishment. 

“ Lord ! everybody is going about his business, and that 
has addled her wits. There ! she is crying upstairs. It will 
do her good to snivel a bit. It’s the first time she has 
cried since I’ve been with her.” 

By the morning, Mme. Vauquer, to use her own expression, 
had “ made up her mind to it.” True, she still wore a doleful 
countenance, as might be expected of a woman who had lost 
all her lodgers, and whose manner of life had been suddenly 
revolutionized, but she had all her wits about her. Her grief 
was genuine and profound ; it was real pain of mind, for her 
purse had suffered, the routine of her existence had been 
broken. A lover’s farewell glance at his lady-love’s window 
is not more mournful than Mme. Vauquer’s survey of the 
empty places round her table. Eugene administered comfort, 
telling the widow that Bianchon, whose term of residence at 
the hospital was about to expire, would doubtless take his 
(Rastignac’s) place ; that the official from the Museum had 
often expressed a desire to have Mme. Couture’s room ; and 
that in a very few days her household /ould be on the old 
footing. 

“ God send it may, my dear sir ! but bad luck has come to 
lodge here. There’ll be a death in the house before ten days 
are out, you’ll see,” and she gave a lugubrious look around the 
dining-room. “ Whose turn will it be, I wonder ? ” 

“ It is just as well that we are moving out,” said Eugene to 
Father Goriot in a low voice. 

“ Madame,” said Sylvie, running in with a scared face, “I 
have not seen Mistigris these three days.” 

“Ah ! well, if my cat is dead, if he has gone and left us, 
then I ” 

The poor woman could not finish her sentence; she clasped 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


233 


her hands and hid her face on the back of her armchair, quite 
overcome by this dreadful portent. 

By twelve o’clock, when the postman reaches that quarter, 
Eugene received a letter. The dainty envelope bore the 
Beauseant arms on the seal, and contained an invitation to 
the Vicomtesse’s great ball, which had been talked of in Paris 
for a month. A little note for Eugene was slipped in with 
the card. 

“I think, monsieur, that you will undertake with pleasure 
to interpret my sentiments to Mme. de Nucingen, so I am 
sending the card for which you asked me to you. I shall be 
delighted to make the acquaintance of Mme. de Restaud’s 
sister. Pray introduce that charming lady to me, and do not 
let her monopolize all your affection, for you owe me not a 
little in return for mine. 

“ VlCOMTESSE DE BEAUSEANT.” 

“ Well,” said Eugene to himself, as he read the note a 
second time, “Mme. de Beauseant says pretty plainly that 
she does not want the Baron de Nucingen.” 

He went to Delphine at once in his joy. He had procured 
this pleasure for he< , and doubtless he would receive the price 
of it. Mme. de Nucingen was dressing. Rastignac waited 
in her boudoir, enduring as best he might the natural impa- 
tience of an eager temperament for the reward desired and 
withheld for a year. Such sensations are only known once in 
a life. The first woman to whom a man is drawn, if she is 
really a woman — that is to say, if she appears to him amid 
the splendid accessories that form a necessary background to 
life in the world of Paris — will never have a rival. 

Love in Paris is a thing distinct and apart ; for in Paris 
neither men nor women are the dupes of the commonplaces 
by which people seek to throw a veil over their motives, or to 
parade a fine affectation of disinterestedness in their senth 


234 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


ments. In this country within a country, it is not merely 
required of a woman that she should satisfy the senses and the 
soul ; she knows perfectly well that she has still greater obliga- 
tions to discharge, that she must fulfill the countless demands 
of a vanity that enters into every fibre of that living organism 
called society. Love, for her, is above all things, and by its 
very nature, a vainglorious, brazen-fronted, ostentatious, 
thriftless charlatan. If at the court of Louis XIV. there was 
not a woman but envied Mile, de la Valliere the reckless 
devotion of passion that led the grand monarch to tear the 
priceless ruffles at his wrists in order to assist the entry of a 
Due de Vermandois into the world — what can you expect of 
the rest of society? You must have youth and wealth and 
rank ; nay, you must, if possible, have more than these, for 
the more incense you bring with you to burn at the shrine of 
the god, the more favorably will he regard the worshiper. 
Love is a religion, and his cult must in the nature of things 
be more costly than those of all other deities ; love the spoiler 
stays for a moment, and then passes on ; like the urchin of 
the streets, his course may be traced by the ravages that he 
has made. The wealth of feeling and imagination is the 
poetry of the garret ; how should love exist there without 
that wealth ? 

If there are exceptions who do not subscribe to these Dra- 
conian laws of the Parisian code, they are solitary examples. 
Such souls live so far out of the main current that they are 
not borne away by the doctrines of society ; they dwell beside 
some clear spring of ever-flowing water, without seeking to 
leave the green shade ; happy to listen to the echoes of the 
infinite in everything around them and in their own souls, 
waiting in patience to take their flight for heaven, while they 
look with pity upon those of earth. 

Rastignac, like most young men who have been early 
impressed by the circumstance of power and grandeur, meant 
to enter the lists fully armed ; the burning ambition of con- 


FATHER GO RIOT 


235 


quest possessed him already ; perhaps he was conscious of his 
powers, but as yet he knew neither the end to which his 
ambition was to be directed nor the means of attaining it. 
In default of the pure and sacred love that fills a life, ambi- 
tion may become something very noble, subduing to itself 
every thought of personal interest, and setting as the end — 
the pre-eminent greatness, not of one man, but of a whole 
nation. 

But the student had not yet reached the time of life when 
a man surveys the whole course of existence and judges it 
soberly. Hitherto he had scarcely so much as shaken off the 
spell of the fresh and gracious influences that envelop a child- 
hood in the country, like green leaves and grass. He had 
hesitated on the brink of the Parisian Rubicon, and, in spite 
of the prickings of ambition, he still clung to a lingering 
tradition of an old ideal — the peaceful life of the noble in his 
chateau. But yesterday evening, at the sight of his rooms, 
those scruples had vanished. He had learned what it was to 
enjoy the material advantages of fortune, as he had already 
enjoyed the social advantages of birth ; he ceased to be a 
provincial from that moment, and slipped naturally and 
easily into a position which opened up the prospect of a brilliant 
future. 

So, as he waited for Delphine, in the pretty boudoir, 
where he felt that he had a certain right to be, he felt 
himself so far away from the Rastignac who came back to 
Paris a year ago, that, turning some power of inner vision 
upon this latter, he asked himself whether that past self bore 
any resemblance to the Rastignac of that moment. 

“ Madame is in her room,” Therese came to tell him. The 
woman’s voice made him start. 

He found Delphine lying back in her low chair by the fire- 
side, looking fresh and bright. The sight of her among the 
flowing draperies of muslin suggested some beautiful tropical 
flower, where the fruit is set amid the blossom. 


236 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


“Well,” she said, with a tremor in her voice, “here you 
are. 

“ Guess what I bring for you,” said Eugene, sitting down 
beside her. He took possession of her arm to kiss her hand. 

Mme. de Nucingen gave a joyful start as she saw the card. 
She turned to Eugene ; there were tears in her eyes as she 
flung her arms about his neck, and drew him towards her in a 
frenzy of gratified vanity. 

“And I owe this happiness to you — to thee ” (she whis- 
pered the more intimate word in his ear) ; “ but Therese is in 
my dressing-room, let us be prudent. This happiness — yes, 
for I may call it so, when it comes to me through you — is 
surely more than a triumph for self-love ? No one has been 
willing to introduce me into that set. Perhaps just now I 
may seem to you to be frivolous, petty, shallow, like a Paris- 
ienne, but remember, my friend, that I am ready to give up all 
for you ; and that if I long more than ever for an entrance 
into the Faubourg Saint-Germain, it is because I shall meet 
you there.” 

“ Mme. de Beauseant’s note seems to say very plainly that 
she does not expect to see th q Baron de Nucingen at her ball ; 
don’t you think so?” said Eugene. 

“ Why, yes,” said the Baroness as she returned the letter. 
“Those women have a talent for insolence. But it is of no 
consequence, I shall go. My sister is sure to be there, and 
sure to be very beautifully dressed. Eugene,” she went on, 
lowering her voice, “ she will go to dispel ugly suspicions. 
You do not know the things that people are saying about 
her ! Only this morning Nucingen came to tell me that they 
had been discussing her at the club. Great heavens ! on what 
does a woman’s character and the honor of a whole family 
depend ! I feel that I am nearly touched and wounded in 
my poor sister. According to some people, M. de Trailles 
must have put his name to bills for a hundred thousand francs, 
nearly all of them are overdue, and proceedings are threat- 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


237 


ened. In this predicament, it seems that my sister sold her 
diamonds to a Jew — the beatiful diamonds that belonged to 
her husband’s mother, Mme. de Restaud the elder — you have 
seen her wearing them. In fact, nothing else has been talked 
about for the last two days. So I can see that Anastasie is 
sure to come to Mme. de Beauseant’s ball in tissue of gold, 
and ablaze with diamonds, to draw all eyes upon her ; and I 
will not be outshone. She has tried to eclipse me all her life; 
she has never been kind to me, and I have helped her so 
often, and always had money for her when she had none. 
But never mind other people now, to-day I mean to be per- 
fectly happy.” 

At one o’clock that morning Eugene was still with Mme. 
de Nucingen. In the midst of their lovers’ farewell, a fare- 
well full of hope of bliss to come, she said in a troubled voice, 
“ I am very fearful, superstitious. Give what name you like 
to my presentiments, but I am afraid that my happiness will 
be paid for by some horrible catastrophe.” 

“ Child ! ” said Eugene. 

“Ah! have we changed places, and am I the child to- 
night?” she asked laughingly. 

Eugene went back to the Maison Vauquer, never doubting 
but that he should leave it for good on the morrow ; and on 
the way he fell to dreaming the bright dreams of youth, when 
the cup of happiness has left its sweetness on the lips. 

“Well? ” cried Goriot, as Rastignac passed by his door. 

“Yes,” said Eugene; “I will tell you everything to-mor- 
row.” 

“Everything, will you not?” cried the old man. “ Go to 
bed. To-morrow our happy life will begin.” 

Next day, Goriot and Rastignac were ready to leave the 
lodging-house, and only awaited the good pleasure of a porter 
to move out of it ; but towards noon there was a sound of 
wheels in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve, and a carriage 
stopped before the door of the Maison Vauquer. Mme. de 


238 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


Nucingen alighted, and asked if her father was still in the 
house, and, receiving an affirmative reply from Sylvie, ran 
lightly upstairs. 

It so happened that Eugene was at home all unknown to his 
neighbor. At breakfast-time he had asked Goriot to superin- 
tend the removal of his goods, saying that he would meet 
him in the Rue d’ Artois at four o’clock; but Rastignac’s 
name had been called early on the list at the Ecole de droit, 
and he had gone back at once to the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Gene- 
vieve. No one had seen him come in, for Goriot had gone 
to find a porter, and the mistress of the house was likewise 
out. Eugene had thought to pay her himself, for it struck 
him that if he left this, Goriot in his zeal would probably pay 
for him. As it was, Eugene went up to his room to see that 
nothing had been forgotten, and blessed his foresight when he 
saw the blank bill bearing Vautrin’s signature lying in the 
drawer where he had carelessly thrown it on the day when he 
had repaid the amount. There was no fire in the grate, so 
he was about to tear it into little pieces, when he heard a voice 
speaking in Goriot’s room, and the speaker was Delphine ! 
He made no more noise, and stood still to listen, thinking 
that she should have no secrets from him ; but after the first 
few words, the conversation between the father and daughter 
was so strange and interesting that it absorbed all his atten- 
tion. 

“Ah! thank heaven that you thought of asking him to 
give an account of the money settled on me before I was 
utterly ruined, father. Is it safe to talk? ” she added. 

“ Yes, there is no one in the house,” said her father faintly. 

“ What is the matter with you?” asked Mme. de Nucin- 
gen. 

“God forgive you! you have just dealt me a staggering 
blow, child ! ” said the old man. “ You cannot know how 
much I love you, or you would not have burst in upon me 
like this, with such news, especially if all is not lost. Has 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


239 


Something so important happened that you must come here 
about it ? In a few minutes we should have been in the Rue 
d’ Artois.” 

“ Eh ! does one think what one is doing after a catastrophe ? 
It has turned my head. Your attorney has found out the 
state of things now, but it was bound to come out sooner or 
later. We shall want your long business experience; and I 
came to you like a drowning man who catches at a branch. 
When M. Derville found that Nucingen was throwing all sorts 
of difficulties in his way, he threatened him with proceedings, 
and told him plainly that he would soon obtain an order from 
the president of the Tribunal. So Nucingen came to my 
room this morning, and asked if I meant to ruin us both. I 
told him that I knew nothing whatever about it, that I had a 
fortune, and ought to be put into possession of my fortune, 
and that my attorney was acting for me in the matter ; I said 
again that I knew absolutely nothing about it, and could not 
possibly go into the subject with him. Wasn’t that what you 
told me to tell him ? ” 

“Yes, quite right,” answered Goriot. 

“ Well, then,” Delphine continued, “ he told me all about 
his affairs. He had just invested all his capital and mine in 
business speculations ; they have only just been started, and 
very large sums of money are locked up. If I were to com- 
pel him to refund my dowry now, he would be forced to file 
his petition ; but if I will wait a year, he undertakes, on his 
honor, to double or treble my fortune, by investing it in 
building land, and I shall be mistress at last of the whole of 
my property. He was speaking the truth, father dear ; he 
frightened me ! He asked my pardon for his conduct ; he 
has given me my liberty ; I am free to act as I please on con- 
ditions that I leave him to carry on my business in my name. 
To prove his sincerity, he promised that M. Derville might 
inspect the accounts as often as I pleased, so that I might be 
assured that everything was being conducted properly. In 


240 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


short, he put himself into my power, bound hand and foot. 
He wishes the present arrangements as to the expenses of 
housekeeping to continue for two more years, and entreated 
me not to exceed my allowance. He showed me plainly that 
it was all that he could do to keep up appearances ; he has 
broken with his opera dancer ; he will be compelled to practice 
the most strict economy (in secret) if he is to bide his time 
with unshaken credit. I scolded, I did all I could to drive 
him to desperation, so as to find out more. He showed me 
his ledgers — he broke down and cried at last. I never saw a 
man in such a state. He lost his head completely, talked of 
killing himself, and raved till I felt quite sorry for him.” 

“ Do you really believe that silly rubbish? ” cried her 

father. “ It was all got up for your benefit ! I have had to do 
with Germans in the way of business ; honest and straightfor- 
ward they are prety sure to be, but when with their simplicity 
and frankness they are sharpers and humbugs as well, they are 
the worst rogues of all. Your husband is taking advantage of 
you. As soon as pressure is brought to bear on him he shams 
dead ; he means to be more the master under your name than 
in his own. He will take advantage of the position to secure 
himself against the risks of business. He is as sharp as he is 
treacherous ; he is a bad lot ! No, no ; I am not going 
to leave my girls behind me without a penny when I go 
to Pere-Lachaise. I know something about business still. 
He has sunk his money in speculation, he says ; very 
well, then there is something to show for it — bills, 
receipts, papers of some sort. Let him produce them, 
and come to an arrangement with you. We will choose 
the most promising of his speculations, take them over at our 
own risk, and have the securities transferred into your name ; 
they shall represent the separate estate of Delphine Goriot, 
wife of the Baron de Nucingen. Does that fellow really take 
us for idiots? Does he imagine that I could stand the idea 
of your being without fortune, without bread, for forty-eight 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


241 


hours? I would not stand it a day — no, not a night, not a 
couple of hours ! If there had been any foundation for the 
idea, I should never get over it. What ! I have worked hard 
for forty years, carried sacks on my back, and sweated and 
pinched and saved all my life for you, my darlings, for you 
who made the toil and every burden borne for you seem light; 
and now, my fortune, my whole life, is to vanish in smoke ! 
I should die raving mad if I believed a word of it. By all 
that’s holiest in heaven and earth, we will have this cleared 
up at once ; go through the books, have the whole business 
looked thoroughly into ! I will not sleep, nor rest, nor eat 
until I have satisfied myself that all your fortune is in exist- 
ence. Your money is settled upon you, God be thanked ! 
and, luckily, your attorney, Maitre Derville, is an honest 
man. Good Lord ! you shall have your snug little million, 
your fifty thousand francs a year, as long as you live, or I will 
raise a racket in Paris, I will so ! If the Tribunals put upon 
us, I will appeal to the Chambers. If I knew that you were 
well and comfortably off as far as money is concerned, that 
thought would keep me easy in spite of bad health and 
troubles. Money? why, it is life ! Money does everything. 
That great dolt of an Alsatian shall sing to another tune ! 
Look here, Delphine, don’t give way, don’t make a conces- 
sion of half a quarter of a farthing to that fathead, who has 
ground you down and made you miserable. If he can’t do 
without you, we will give him a good cudgeling, and keep 
him in order. Great heavens ! my brain is on fire ; it is as if 
there were something redhot inside my head. My Delphine 
lying on straw! You ! my Fifine ! Good gracious ! Where 
are my gloves ? Come, let us go at once ; I mean to see 
everything with my own eyes — books, cash, and correspond- 
ence, the whole business. I shall have no peace until I know 
for certain that your fortune is secure ! ” 

“ Oh ! father dear, be careful how you set about it ! If 
there is the least hint of vengeance in the business, if you 
16 


242 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


show yourself openly hostile, it will be all over with me. 
He knows whom he has to deal with ; he thinks it quite 
natural that if you put the idea into my head, I should be 
uneasy about my money ; but I swear to you that he has it in 
his own hands, and that he had meant to keep it. He is just 
the man to abscond with all the money and leave us in the 
lurch, the scoundrel ! He knows quite well that I will not 
dishonor the name I bear by bringing him into a court of 
law. His position is strong and weak at the same time. If 
we drive him to despair, I am lost.” 

“ Why, then, the man is a rogue?” 

“Well, yes, father,” she said, flinging herself into a chair. 
“I wanted to keep it from you to spare your feelings,” and 
she burst into tears; “ I did not want you to know that you 
had married me to such a man as he is. He is just the same 
in private life — body and soul and conscience — the same 
through and through — hideous ! I hate him ; I despise him ! 
Yes, after all that that despicable Nucingen has told me, I 
cannot respect him any longer. A man capable of mixing 
himself up in such affairs, and of talking about them to me 
as he did, without the slightest scruple — it is because I have 
read him through and through that I am afraid of him. He, 
my husband, frankly proposed to give me my liberty, and do 
you know what that means? It means that if things turn 
out badly for him, I am to play into his hands, and be his 
stalking-horse.” 

“But there is law to be had! There is a Place de 
Greve for sons-in-law of that sort,” cried her father; “why, 
I would guillotine him myself if there was no headsman to 
do it.” 

“ No, father, the law cannot touch him. Listen, this is 
what he says, stripped of all his circumlocutions — * Take your 
choice, you and no one else can be my accomplice ; either 
everything is lost, you are ruined and have not a farthing, or 
you will let me carry this business through myself.’ Is that 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


243 


plain speaking ? He must have my assistance. He is assured 
that his wife will deal fairly by him ; he knows that I shall 
leave his money to him and be content with my own. It is 
an unholy and dishonest compact, and he holds out threats of 
ruin to compel me to consent to it. He is buying my con- 
science, and the price is liberty to be Eugene’s wife in all but 
name. ‘ I connive at your errors, and you allow me to com- 
mit crimes and ruin poor families ! ’ Is that sufficiently ex- 
plicit ? Do you know what he means by speculations ? He 
buys up land in his own name, then he finds men of straw to 
run up houses upon it. These men make a bargain with a 
contractor to build the houses, paying them by bills at long 
dates ; then in consideration of a small sum they leave my 
husband in possession of the houses, and finally slip through 
the fingers of the deluded contractors by going into bank- 
ruptcy. The name of the firm of Nucingen has been used to 
dazzle the poor contractors. I saw that. I noticed, too, 
that Nucingen had sent bills for large amounts to Amsterdam, 
London, Naples, and Vienna, in order to prove if necessary 
that large sums had been paid away by the firm. How could 
we get possession of those bills? ” 

Eugene heard a dull thud on the floor ; Father Goriot must 
have fallen on his knees. 

“ Great heavens! what have I done to you? Bound my 
daughter to this scoundrel who does as he likes with her ! 
Oh! my child, my child! forgive me!” eagerly cried the 
old man. 

“Yes, if I am in the depths of despair, perhaps you are to 
blame,” said Delphine. “ We have so little sense when we 
marry ! What do we know of the world, of business, or 
men, or life? Our fathers should think for us ! Father dear, 
I am not blaming you in the least, forgive me for what I said. 
This is all my own fault. Nay, do not cry, papa,” she said, 
kissing him. 

(( Do not you cry either, my little Delphine, Look up and 


244 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


let me kiss away the tears. There ! I shall find my wits and 
unravel this skein of your husband’s winding.” 

“ No, let me do that ; I shall be able to manage him. He 
is fond of me, well and good ; I shall use my influence to 
make him invest my money as soon as possible in landed 
property in my own name. Very likely I could get him to 
buy back Nucingen in Alsace in my name ; that has always 
been a pet idea of his. Still, come to-morrow and go through 
the books, and look into the business. M. Derville knows 
little of mercantile matters. No, not to-morrow though. I 
do not want to be upset. Mme. de Beauseant’s ball will be 
the day after to-morrow, and I must keep quiet, so as to look 

my best and freshest, and do honor to my dear Eugene ! 

Come, let us see his room.” 

But as she spoke a carriage stopped in the Rue Neuve- 
Sainte-Genevieve, and the sound of Mme. de Restaud’s voice 
came from the staircase. “ Is my father in ? ” she asked of 
Sylvie. 

This accident was luckily timed for Eugene, whose one 
idea had been to throw himself down on the bed and 
pretend to be asleep. 

“Oh, father, have you heard about Anastasie?” said 
Delphine, when she heard her sister speak. “It looks as 
though some strange things had happened in that family.” 

“ What sort of things ? ” asked Goriot. “ This is like to 
be the death of me. My poor head will not stand a double 
misfortune.” 

“ Good-morning, father,” said the Countess from the thresh-* 
old. “Oh ! Delphine, are you here?” 

Mme. de Restaud seemed taken aback by her sister’s 
presence. 

“Good-morning, Nasie,” said the Baroness. “What is 
there so extraordinary in my being here? /see our father 
every day.” 

“ Since when ? ” 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


245 


“ If you came yourself you would know.” 

“ Don’t tease, Delphine,” said the Countess fretfully. “ I 
am very miserable, I am lost. Oh ! my poor father, it is 
hopeless this time ! ” 

“ What is it, Nasie?” cried Goriot. “ Tell us all about it, 
child ! How white she is ! Quick, do something, Delphine ; 
be kind to her, and I will love you even better, if that were 
possible.” 

“ Poor Nasie!” said Mme. de Nucingen, drawing her 
sister to a chair. “ We are the only two people in the world 
whose love is always sufficient to forgive you everything. 
Family affection is the surest, you see.” 

The Countess inhaled the salts and revived. 

“This will kill me!” said their father. “There,” he 
went on, stirring the smoldering fire, “ come nearer, both of 
you. It is cold. What is it, Nasie? Be quick and tell me, 
this is enough to ” 

“Well, then, my husband knows everything,” said the 
Countess. “Just imagine it; do you remember, father, that 
bill of Maxime’s some time ago? Well, that was not the 
first. I had paid ever so many before that. About the be- 
ginning of January M. de Trailles seemed very much troubled. 
He said nothing to me; but it is so easy to read the hearts of 
those you love, a mere trifle is enough ; and then you feel 
things instinctively. Indeed, he was more tender and affec- 
tionate than ever, and I was happier than I had ever been 
before. Poor Maxime ! in himself he was really saying good- 
by to me, so he has told me since; he meant to blow his 
brains out ! At last I worried him so, and begged and im- 
plored so hard ; for two hours I knelt at his knees and prayed 
and entreated, and at last he told me — that he owed a hundred 
thousand francs. Oh ! papa ! a hundred thousand francs ! 
I was beside myself ! You had not the money, I knew ; I had 
eaten up all that you had ” 

“No,” said Goriot : “ I could not have gotten it for you 


246 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


unless I had stolen it. But I would have done that for you, 
Nasie ! I will do it yet.” 

The words came from him like a sob, a hoarse sound like 
the death-rattle of a dying man ; it seemed indeed like the 
agony of death when the father’s love was powerless. There 
was a pause, and neither of the sisters spoke. It must have 
been selfishness indeed that could hear unmoved that cry of 
anguish that, like a pebble thrown over a precipice, revealed 
the depths of his despair. 

‘ ‘ I found the money, father, by selling what was not mine 
to sell,” and the Countess burst into tears. 

Delphine was touched ; she laid her head on her sister’s 
shoulder, and cried too. 

“ Then it is all true,” she said. 

Anastasie bowed her head. Mme. de Nucingen flung her 
arms about her, kissed her tenderly, and held her sister to her 
heart. 

“I shall always love you and never judge you, Nasie,” she 
said. 

“My angels!” murmured Goriot faintly. “Oh, why 
should it be trouble that draws you together?” 

This warm and palpitating affection seemed to give the 
Countess courage. 

“To save Maxime’s life,” she said, “ to save all my own 
happiness, I went to the money-lender you know of, a man 
of iron forged in hell-fire; nothing can melt him; I took all 
the family diamonds that M. de Restaud is so proud of — his 
and mine too — and sold them to that M. Gobseck. Sold 
Ihem / Do you understand ? I saved Maxime, but I am lost. 
Restaud found it all out.” 

“How? Who told him? I will kill him,” cried Goriot. 

“ Yesterday he sent to tell me to come to his room. I 

went ‘ Anastasie,’ he said in a voice — oh ! such a voice ; 

that was enough, it told me everything — ‘ where are your dia- 
monds? ’ ‘ In my room ’ ‘ No/ he said, looking straight at 


FATHER GORIOT. 


247 


me, 4 there they are on that chest of drawers ’ and he lifted 

his handkerchief and showed me the casket. ‘ Do you know 

where they come from ? ’ he said. I fell at his feet I 

cried ; I besought him to tell me the death he wished to see 
me die.” 

“You said that !” cried Goriot. “By God in heaven, 
whoever lays a hand on either of you so long as I am alive 
may reckon on being roasted by slow fires ! Yes, I will cut 
him in pieces like ” 

Goriot stopped ; the words died away in his throat. 

“And then, dear, he asked something worse than death of 
me. Oh ! heaven preserve all other women from hearing 
such words as I heard then ! ” 

“I will murder that man,” said Goriot quietly. “But he 
has only one life, and he deserves to die twice. And then, 
what next? ” he added, looking at Anastasie. 

“Then,” the Countess resumed, “there was a pause, and 
he looked at me. ‘Anastasie,’ he said, ‘I will bury this in 
silence; there shall be no separation ; there are the children. 

I will not kill M. de Trailles. I might miss him if we fought, 
and as for other ways of getting rid of him, I should come 
into collision with the law. If I killed him in your arms, it 
would bring dishonor on those children. But if you do not 
want to see your children perish, nor their father nor me, you 
must first of all submit to two conditions. Answer me. Have 
I a child of my own ? ’ I answered, ‘ Yes.’ ‘ Which ? ’ ‘ Ernest, 
our eldest boy.’ ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘and now swear to 
obey me in this particular from this time forward.’ I swore. 

‘ You will make over your property to me when I require you 
to do so.’ ” 

“ Do nothing of the kind ! ” cried Goriot. “Aha ! M. de 
Restaud, you could not make your wife happy ; she has looked 
for happiness and found it elsewhere, and you make her suffer 
for your own inaptitude ? He will have to reckon with me. 
Make yourself easy, Nasie. Aha ! he cares about his heir ! 

I 


248 


FATHER GORIOT. 


Good, very good. I will get hold of the boy ; isn’t he my 
grandson ? What the blazes ! I can surely go to see the brat ! 
I will stow him away somewhere; I will take care of him, 
you may be quite easy. I will bring Restaud to terms, the 
monster ! I shall say to him, ‘ A word or two with you ! If 
you want your son back again, give my daughter her property, 
and leave her to do as she pleases.’ ” 

“ Father ! ” 

u Yes. I am your father, Nasie, a father indeed ! That 
rogue of a great lord had better not ill-treat my daughter. 
Thunder ! What is it in my veins? There is the blood of a 
tiger in me ; I could tear those two men to pieces ! Oh ! 
children, children ! so this is what your lives are ! Why, it 

is death ! What will become of you when I shall be here 

no longer ? Fathers ought to live as long as their children. 
Ah ! Lord God in heaven ! how ill Thy world is ordered ! 
Thou hast a Son, if what they tell us is true, and yet Thou 
leavest us to suffer so through our children. My darlings, 
my darlings ! to think that trouble only should bring you to 
me, that I should only see you with tears on your faces ! Ah ! 
yes, yes, you love me, I see that you love me. Come to me 
and pour out your griefs to me ; my heart is large enough to 
hold them all. Oh ! you might rend my heart in pieces, and 
every fragment would make a father’s heart. If only I could 

bear all your sorrows for you ! Ah ! you were so happy 

when you were little and still with me ” 

“We have never been happy since,” said Delphine. 
“ Where are the old days when we slid down the sacks in the 
great granary ? ’ ’ 

“That is not all, father,” said Anastasie in Goriot’s ear. 
The old man gave a startled shudder. “ The diamonds only 
sold for a hundred thousand francs. Maxime is hard pressed. 
There are twelve thousand francs still to pay. He has given 
me his word that he will be steady and give up play in future. 
His love is all that I have left in the world. I have paid such 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


249 


a fearful price for it that I shall die if I lose him now. I have 
sacrificed my fortune, my honor, mv peace of mind, and my 
children for him. Oh ! do something, so that at the least 
Maxime may be at large and live undisgraced in the world, 
where he will assuredly make a career for himself. Some- 
thing more than my happiness is at stake ; the children have 
nothing, and if he is sent to Sainte-Pelagie all his prospects 
will be ruined." 

“ I haven’t the money, Nasie. I have nothing — nothing 
left. This is the end of everything. Yes, the world is crum- 
bling into ruin, I am sure. Fly ! Save yourselves ! Ah ! I 
have still my silver buckles left and half-a-dozen silver spoons 
and forks, the first I ever had in my life. But I have nothing 
else except my life annuity, twelve hundred francs ” 

“ Then what has become of your money in the funds? ’’ 

“ I sold out, and only kept a trifle for my wants. I wanted 
twelve thousand francs to furnish some rooms for Delphine.” 

“ In your own house?” asked Mme. de Restaud, looking 
at her sister. 

“ What does it matter where they were?” asked Goriot. 
“ The money is spent now.” 

“ I see how it is,” said the Countess. “ Rooms for M. de 
Rastignac. Poor Delphine, take warning by me ! ” 

“ M. de Rastignac is incapable of ruining the woman he 
loves, dear.” 

“ Thanks ! Delphine. I thought you would have been 
kinder to me in my troubles, but you never did love me.” 

“Yes, yes, she loves you, Nasie!” cried Goriot; “she 
was saying so only just now. We were talking about you, 
and she insisted that you were beautiful, and that she herself 
was only pretty ! ” 

“ Pretty ! ” said the Countess. “She is as hard as a mar- 
ble statue.” 

“And if I am, ” cried Delphine, flushing up, “how have 
you treated me ? You would not recognize me ; you dosed 


250 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


the doors of every house against me ; you have never let an 
opportunity of mortifying me slip by. And when did I come, 
as you were always doing, to drain our poor father, a thou- 
sand francs at a time, till he is left as you see him now? 
That is all your doing, sister ! I myself have seen my father 
as often as I could. I have not turned him out of the house, 
and then come and fawned upon him when I wanted money. 
I did not so much as know that he had spent those twelve 
thousand francs on me. I am economical, as you know; and 
when papa has made me presents, it has never been because I 
came and begged for them.” 

“You were better off than I. M. de Marsay was rich, as 
you have reason to know. You always were as slippery as 
gold. Good-by; I have neither sister nor ” 

“Oh ! hush, hush ! Nasie ! ” cried her father. 

“ Nobody else would repeat what everybody has ceased to 
believe. You are an unnatural sister ! ” cried Delphine. 

“Oh, children, children ! hush ! hush ! or I will kill my- 
self before your eyes.” 

“There, Nasie, I forgive you,” said Mme. de Niicingen ; 
“ you are very unhappy. But I am kinder than you are. 
How could you say that just when I was ready to do anything 
in the world to help you, even to be reconciled with my hus- 
band, which for my own sake I Oh ! it is just like you ; 

you have behaved cruelly to me all through these nine years.” 

“ Children, children, kiss each other ! ” cried the father. 
“You are angels, both of you.” 

“ No. Let me alone,” cried the Countess, shaking off the 
hand that her father had laid on her arm. “ She is more 
merciless than my husband. Any one might think she was a 
model of all the virtues herself! ” 

“ I would rather have people think that I owed money to 
M. de Marsay than own that M. de Trailles had cost me more 
than two hundred thousand francs,” retorted Mme. de 
Nucingen. 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


251 


“ Delphine /” cried the Countess, stepping towards her 
sister. 

“ I shall tell you the truth about yourself if you begin to 
slander me,” said the Baroness coldly. 

“ Delphine ! you are a ” 

Father Goriot sprang between them, grasped the Countess’ 
hand, and laid his own over her mouth. 

“ Good heavens, father ! What have you been handling 
this morning? ” said Anastasie. 

“Ah! well, yes, I ought not to have touched you,” said 
the poor father, wiping his hands on his trousers, “ but I 
have been packing up my things ; I did not know that you 
were coming to see me.” 

He was glad that he had drawn down her wrath upon 
himself. 

“Ah! ” he sighed, as he sat down, “you children have 
broken my heart between you. This is killing me. My head 
feels as if it were on fire. Be good to each other and love 
each other ! This will be the death of me ! Delphine ! 
Nasie ! come, be sensible ; you are both in the wrong. Come, 
Dedel,” he added, looking through his tears at the Baroness, 
“she must have twelve thousand francs, you see; let us see if 
we can find them for her. Oh, my girls, do not look at each 
other like that ! ” and he sank on his knees beside Delphine. 

“ Ask her to forgive you — just to please me,” he said in her 
ear. “ She is more miserable than you are. Come now, 
Dedel.” 

“Poor Nasie !” said Delphine, alarmed at the wild ex- 
travagant grief in her father’s face, “ I was in the wrong, 
kiss me ” 

“ Ah ! that is like balm to my heart,” cried Father Goriot. 
“But how are we to find twelve thousand francs? I might 
offer myself as a substitute in the army ” 

“ Oh ! father dear! ” they both cried, flinging their arms 
about him. “ No, no ! ” 


252 


FATHER GO RIOT 


“ God reward you for the thought. We are not worth it, 
are we, Nasie ? ” asked Delphine. 

“ And besides, father dear, it would only be a drop in the 
bucket,” observed the Countess. 

“But is flesh and blood worth nothing?” cried the old 
man in his despair. “I would give body and soul to save 
you, Nasie. I would do a murder for the man who would 
rescue you. I would do, as Vautrin did, go to the hulks, 

go ” he stopped as if struck by a thunderbolt, and put 

both hands to his head. “ Nothing left ! ” he cried, tearing 
his hair. “ If I only knew of a way to steal money, but it is so 
hard to do it, and then you can’t set to work by yourself, and 
it takes time to rob a bank. Yes, it is time I was dead ; there 
is nothing left me to do but to die. I am no good in the 
world ; I am no longer a father ! No. She has come to me 
in her extremity, and, wretch that I am, I have nothing to 
give her. Ah ! you put your money into a life annuity, old 
scoundrel ; and had you not daughters ? You did not love 
them. Die, die in a ditch, like the dog that you are ! Yes, 
I am worse than a dog ; a beast would not have done as I 

have done ! Oh ! my head it throbs as if it would 

burst.” 

“Papa!” cried both the young women at once, “do, 
pray, be reasonable ! ” and they clung to him to prevent him 
from dashing his head against the wall. There was a sound 
of sobbing. 

Eugene, greatly alarmed, took the bill that bore Vautrin’s 
signature, saw that the stamp would suffice for a larger sum, 
altered the figures, made it into a regular bill for twelve 
thousand francs, payable to Goriot’s order, and went to his 
neighbor’s room, determined to help him out of his present 
trouble by a great sacrifice on his own part. 

“ Here is the money, madame,” he said, handing the piece 
of paper to her. “ I was asleep ; your conversation awoke 
me, and by this means I learned all that I owed to M. Goriot. 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


253 


This bill can be discounted, and I shall meet it punctually at 
the due date.” 

The Countess stood motionless and speechless, but she held 
the bill in her fingers. 

“ Delphine,” she said, with a white face, and her whole 
frame quivering with indignation, anger, and rage, “ I forgave 
you everything ; God is my witness that I forgave you, but I 
cannot forgive this ! So this gentleman was there all the 
time, and you knew it ! Your petty spite has led you to wreak 
your vengeance on me by betraying my secrets, my life, my 
children’s lives, my shame, my honor ! There, you are noth- 
ing to me any longer. I hate you. I will do all that I can 
to injure you. I will ” 

Anger paralyzed her; the words died in her dry parched 
throat. 

“ Why, he is my son, my child ; he is your brother, your 
preserver ! ” cried Goriot. “ Kiss his hand, Nasie ! Stay, I 
will embrace him myself,” he said, straining Eugene to his 
breast in a frenzied clasp. “ Oh my boy ! I will be more 
than a father to you ; I would be everything in the world to 
you; if I had God’s power, I would fling worlds at your feet. 
Why don’t you kiss him, Nasie? He is not a man, but an 
angel, an angel out of heaven.” 

“ Never mind her, father; she is mad just now.” 

“ Mad ! am I ? And what are you?” cried Mme. de 
Restaud. 

“ Children, children, I shall die if you go on like this,” cried 
the old man, and he staggered and fell on the bed as if a bullet 
had struck him. “ They are killing me between them,” he 
said to himself. 

The Countess fixed her eyes on Eugene, who stood stock- 
still ; all his faculties were numbed by this violent scene. 

“Sir? ” she said, doubt and inquiry in her face, tone, 

and bearing ; she took no notice now of her father nor of 
Delphine, who was hastily unfastening his waistcoat. 


254 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


“ Madame,” said Eugene, answering the question before it 
was asked, “ I will meet the bill, and keep silence about it.” 

“ You have killed our father, Nasie ! ” said Delphine, 
pointing to Goriot, who lay unconscious on the bed. The 
Countess fled. 

“ I freely forgive her,” said the old man, opening his eyes ; 
“her position is horrible; it would turn an older head than 
hers. Comfort Nasie, and be nice to her, Delphine ; promise 
it to your poor father before he dies,” he said, holding 
Delphine’s hand in a convulsive clasp. 

“Oh ! what ails you, father? ” she cried in real alarm. 

“Nothing, nothing,” said Goriot; “it will go off. There 
is something heavy pressing on my forehead, a little headache 
only Ah ! poor Nasie, what a life lies before her ! ” 

Just as he spoke, the Countess came back again and flung 
herself on her knees before him. “ Forgive me ! ” she cried. 

“Come,” said her father, “you are hurting me still 
more.” 

“Monsieur,” the Countess said, turning to Rastignac, 
“ misery made me unjust to you. You will be a brother to 
me, will you not? ” and she held out her hand. Her eyes 
were full of tears as she spoke. 

“Nasie,” cried Delphine, flinging her arms round her 
sister, “ my little Nasie, let us forget and forgive.” 

“ No, no,” cried Nasie ; “ I shall never forget ! ” 

“Dear angels,” cried Goriot, “it is as if a dark curtain 
over my eyes had been raised ; your voices have called me 
back to life. Kiss each other once more. Well, now, Nasie, 
that bill will save you, won’t it ? ” 

“I hope so. I say, papa, will you write your name on 
it?” 

“There ! how stupid of me to forget that ! But I am not 
feeling at all well, Nasie, so you must not remember it against 
me. Send and let me know as soon as you are out of your 
strait. No, I will go to you. No, after all, I will not go ; I 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


255 


might meet your husband, and I should kill him on the spot. 
And as for signing away your property, I shall have a word to 
say about that. Quick, my child, and keep Maxime in order 
in future.” 

Eugene was too bewildered to speak. 

“ Poor Anastasie, she always had a violent temper,” said 
Mme. de Nucingen, “but she has a good heart.” 

“ She came back for the endorsement,” said Eugene in 
Delphine’s ear. 

“ Do you think so ? ” 

“I only wish I could think otherwise. Do not trust her,” 
he answered, raising his eyes as if he confided to heaven the 
thoughts that he did not venture to express. 

“Yes, she is always acting a part to some extent.” 

“How do you feel now, dear Father Goriot ? ” asked 
Rastignac. 

“ I should like to go to sleep,” he replied. 

Eugene helped him to bed, and Delphine sat by the 
bedside, holding his hand until he fell asleep. Then she 
went. 

“This evening at the Italiens,” she said to Eugene, “and 
you can let me know how he is. To-morrow you will leave 
this place, monsieur. Let us go into your room. Oh ! how 
frightful!” she cried on the threshold. “Why, you are 
even worse lodged than our father. Eugene, you have behaved 
well. I would love you more if that were possible ; but, dear 
boy, if you are to succeed in life, you must not begin by 
flinging twelve thousand francs out of the windows like that. 
The Comte de Trailles is a confirmed gambler. My sister 
shuts her eyes to it. He would have made the twelve thou- 
sand francs in the same way that he wins and loses heaps of 
gold.” 

A groan from the next room brought them back to Goriot’s 
bedside ; to all appearance he was asleep, but the two lovers 
caught the words, “ They are not happy ! ” Whether he was 


256 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


awake or sleeping, the tone in which they were spoken went 
to his daughter’s heart. She stole up to the pallet-bed on 
which her father lay, and kissed his forehead. He opened 
his eyes. 

“Ah! Delphine ! ” he said. 

“ How are you now ? ” she asked. 

“ Quite comfortable. Do not worry about me ; I shall get 
up presently. Don’t stay with me, children ; go, go and be 
happy.” 

Eugene went back with Delphine as far as her door ; but 
he was not easy about Goriot, and would not stay to dinner, 
as she proposed. He wanted to be back at the Maison 
Vauquer. Father Goriot had left his room, and was just 
sitting down to dinner as he came in. Bianchon had placed 
himself where he could watch the old man carefully; and 
when the old vermicelli-maker took up his square of bread 
and smelt it to find out the quality of the flour, the medical 
student, studying him closely, saw that the action was purely 
mechanical, and shook his head. 

“ Just come and sit over here, hospitaller of Cochin,” said 
Eugene. 

Bianchon went the more willingly because his change of 
place brought him next to the old lodger. 

“ What is wrong with him ? ” asked Rastignac. 

“ It is all up with him, or I am much mistaken ! Some- 
thing very extraordinary must have taken place ; he looks to 
me as if he were in imminent danger of serous apoplexy. 
The lower part of his face is composed enough, but the upper 
part is drawn and distorted. Then there is that peculiar look 
about the eyes that indicates an effusion of serum in the brain ; 
they look as if they were covered with a film of fine dust, do 
you notice? I shall know more about it by to-morrow 
morning.” 

“ Is there any cure for it ? ” 

“ None. It may be possible to stave death off for a time 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


257 


if a way could be found of setting up a reaction in the lower 
extremities ; but if the symptoms do not abate by to-morrow 
evening, it will be all over with him, poor old fellow ! Do 
you know what has happened to bring this on ? There must 
have been some violent shock, and his mind has given way.” 

“Yes, there was,” said Rastignac, remembering how the 
two daughters had struck blow on blow at their father’s heart. 

“ But Delphine at any rate loves her father,” he said to 
himself. 

That evening at the opera Rastignac chose his words care- 
fully, lest he should give Mine, de Nucingen needless alarm. 

“ Do not be anxious about him,” she said, however, as soon 
as Eugene began, “ our father has really a strong constitu- 
tion, but this morning we gave him a shock. Our whole for- 
tunes were in peril, so the thing was serious, you see. I could 
not live if your affection did not make me insensible to trou- 
bles that I should once have thought too hard to bear. At 
this moment I have but one fear left, but one misery to dread 
— to lose the love that has made me feel so glad to live. 
Everything else is as nothing to me compared with your love; 
I care for nothing else, for you are all the world to me. If I 
feel glad to be rich, it is for your sake. To my shame be it 
said, I think of my lover before my father. Do you ask why ? 
I cannot tell you, but all my life is in you. My father gave 
me a heart, but you have taught it to beat. The whole world 
may condemn me; what does it matter if I stand acquitted in 
your eyes, for you have no right to think ill of me for the 
faults which a tyrannous love has forced me to commit for 
you! Do you think me an unnatural daughter? Oh! no, 
no one could help loving such a dear kind father as ours. 
But how could I hide the inevitable consequences of our mis- 
erable marriages from him? Why did he allow us to marry 
when we did ? Was it not his duty to think for us and fore- 
see for us ? To-day I know he suffers as much as we do, but 
how can it be helped ? And as for comforting him, we could 
17 


258 


FATHER GORIOT. 


not comfort him in the least. Our resignation would give 
him more pain and hurt him far more than complaints and 
upbraidings. There are times in life when everything turns 
to bitterness.” 

Eugene was silent, the artless and sincere outpouring made 
an impression on him. 

Parisian women are often false, intoxicated with vanity, 
selfish and self-absorbed, frivolous and shallow; yet of all 
women, when they love, they sacrifice their personal feelings 
to their passion ; they rise but so much the higher for all 
the pettiness overcome in their nature, and become sublime. 
Then Eugene was struck by the profound discernment and 
insight displayed by this woman in judging of natural affection, 
when a privileged affection had separated and set her at a 
distance apart. Mine, de Nucingen was piqued by the silence. 

“ What are you thinking about ? ” she asked. 

“ I am thinking about what you said just now. Hitherto I 
have always felt sure that I cared far more for you than you 
did for me.” 

She smiled, and would npt give way to the happiness she 
felt, lest their talk should exceed the conventional "limits of 
propriety. She had never heard the vibrating tones of a sin- 
cere and youthful love ; a few more words, and she feared for 
her self-control. 

“Eugene,” she said, changing the conversation, “I won- 
der whether you know what has been happening? All Paris 
will go to Mme. de Beauseant’s to-morrow. The Rochefides 
and the Marquis d’Ajuda have agreed to keep the matter a 
profound secret, but to-morrow the king will sign the marriage 
contract, and your poor cousin the Vicomtesse knows nothing 
of it as yet. She cannot put off her ball, and the Marquis 
will not be there. People are wondering what will happen?” 

“The world laughs at baseness and connives at it. But 
this will kill Mme. de Beauseant.” 

“Oh, no,” said Delphine, smiling, 


“ you do not know 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


259 


that kind of woman. Why, all Paris will be there, and so 
shall I ; I ought to go there for your sake.” 

“Perhaps, after all, it is one of those absurd reports that 
people set in circulation here.” 

“ We shall know the truth to-morrow.” 

Eugdne did not return to the Maison Vauquer. He could 
not forego the pleasure of occupying his new rooms in the Rue 
d’Artois. Yesterday evening he had been obliged to leave 
Delphine soon after midnight, but that night it was Delphine 
who stayed with him until two o’clock in the morning. He 
rose late, and waited for Mme. de Nucingen, who came about 
noon to breakfast with him. Youth snatches eagerly at these 
rosy moments of happiness, and Eugene had almost forgotten 
Goriot’s existence. The pretty things that surrounded him 
were growing familiar ; this domestication in itself was one 
long festival for him, and Mme. de Nucingen was there to 
glorify it all by her presence. It was four o’clock before 
they thought of Goriot, and how he had looked forward to 
the new life in that house. Eugene said that the old man 
ought to be moved at once, lest he should grow too ill to 
move. He left Delphine, and hurried back to the lodging- 
house. Neither Father Goriot nor young Bianchon was in 
the dining-room with the others. 

“Aha!” said the painter as Eugene came in, “Father 
Goriot has broken down at last. Bianchon is upstairs with 
him. One of his daughters — the Comtesse de Restaurama — 
came to see the old gentleman, and he would get up and go 
out, and made himself worse. Society is about to lose one 
of its brightest ornaments.” 

Rastignac sprang to the staircase. 

“ Hey ! Monsieur Eugene ! ” 

“ Monsieur Eugene, the mistress is calling you,” shouted 
Sylvie. 

“It is this, sir,” said the widow. “You and M. Goriot 
should by rights have moved out on the 15th of February. 


260 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


That was three days ago ; to-day is the 18th, I ought really 
to be paid a month in advance ; but if you will engage to pay 
for both, I shall be quite satisfied.” 

“ Why can’t you trust him ? ” 

“ Trust him, indeed ! If the old gentleman went off his 
head and died, those daughters of his would not pay me a 
farthing, and his things won’t fetch ten francs. This morn- 
ing he went out with all the spoons and forks he has left, I 
don’t know why. He had got himself up to look quite young, 
and — Lord, forgive me — but I thought he had rouge on his 
cheeks ; he looked quite young again.” 

“I will be responsible,” said Eugene, shuddering with 
horror, for he foresaw the end. 

He climbed the stairs and reached Father Gorioj’s room. 
The old man was tossing on his bed. Bianchon was with 
him. 

“ Good-evening, father,” said Eugene. 

The old man turned his glassy eyes on him, smiled gently, 
and said — 

“ How is she ? ” 

“ She is quite well. But how are you? ” 

“There is nothing much the matter.” 

“ Don’t tire him,” said Bianchon, drawing Eugene into a 
corner of the room. 

“ Well ? ” asked Rastignac. 

“ Nothing but a miracle can save him now. Serous con- 
gestion has set in ; I have put on mustard plasters, and luckily 
he can feel them, they are acting.” 

“ Is it possible to move him ? ” 

“ Quite out of the question. He must stay where he is, 
and be kept as quiet as possible ” 

“Dear Bianchon,” said Eugene, “we will nurse him be- 
tween us.” 

“ I have had the head physician round from my hospital to 
see him.” 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


261 


“ And what did he say ? ” 

“ He will give no opinion till to-morrow evening. He 
promised to look in again at the end of the day. Unluckily, 
the preposterous creature must needs go and do something 
foolish this morning ; he will not say what it was. He is as 
obstinate as a mule. As soon as I begin to talk to him he pre- 
tends not to hear, and lies as if he were asleep instead of 
answering, or if he opens his eyes he begins to groan. Some 
time this morning he went out on foot in the streets, nobody 
knows where he went, and he took everything that he had of 
any value with him. He has been driving some confounded 
bargain, and it has been too much for his strength. One of 
his daughters has been here.” 

“Was it the Countess?” asked Eugene. “A tall, dark- 
haired woman, with large bright eyes, slender figure, and 
little feet?” 

“Yes.” 

“Leave him to me for a bit,” said Rastignac. “I will 
make him confess; he will tell me all about it.” 

“And meanwhile I will get my dinner. But try not to 
excite him ; there is still some hope left.” 

“All right.” 

“How they will enjoy themselves to-morrow,” said Father 
Goriot when they were alone. “ They are going to a grand 
ball.” 

“ What were you doing this morning, papa, to make your- 
self so poorly this evening that you have to stop in bed ? ” 

“ Nothing.” 

“Did not Anastasie come to see you?” demanded Ras- 
tignac. 

“Yes,” said Father Goriot. 

“ Well, then, don’t keep anything from me. What more 
did she want of you ? ” 

“ Oh, she was very miserable,” he answered, gathering up all 
his strength to speak. “It was this way, my boy. Since 


262 


FATHER GORIOT. 


that affair of the diamonds, Nasie has not had a penny of her 
own. For this ball she had ordered a golden gown like a set- 
ting for a jewel. Her mantuamaker, a woman without a 
conscience, would not give her credit, so Nasie’s waiting- 
woman advanced a thousand francs on account. Poor Nasie ! 
reduced to such shifts ! It cut me to the heart to think of it ! 
But when Nasie’s maid saw how things were between her 
master and mistress, she was afraid of losing her money, and 
came to an understanding with the dressmaker, and the 
woman refuses to send the ball-dress until the money is paid. 
The gown is ready, and the ball is to-morrow night ; Nasie 
was in despair. She wanted to borrow my forks and spoons 
to pawn them. Her husband is determined that she shall go 
and wear the diamonds, so as to contradict the stories that are 
told all over Paris. How can she go to that heartless scoun- 
drel and say, ‘I owe a thousand francs to my dressmaker; 
pay her for me ? ’ She cannot. I saw that myself. Delphine 
will be there too in a superb toilet, and Anastasie ought not 
to be outshone by her younger sister. And then — she was 
drowned in tears, poor girl ! I felt so humbled yesterday 
when I had not the twelve thousand francs, that I would have 
given the rest of my miserable life to wipe out that wrong. 
You see, I could have borne anything once, but latterly this 
want of money has broken my heart. Oh ! I did not do it 
by halves ; I titivated myself up a bit, and went out and sold 
my spoons and forks and buckles for six hundred francs ; then 
I went to old Daddy Gobseck and sold a year’s interest in 
my annuity for four hundred francs down. Pshaw ! I can 
live on dry bread, as I did when I was a young man ; if I 
have done it before, I can do it again. My Nasie shall have 
one happy evening, at any rate. She shall be smart. The 
bank-note for a thousand francs is here under my pillow ; it 
warms me to have it lying here under my head, for it is going 
to make my poor Nasie happy. She can turn that bad girl 
Victoire out of the house. A servant that cannot trust her 


FATHER GORIOT. 


263 


mistress, did any one ever hear the like ! I shall be quite 
well to-morrow. Nasie is coming at ten o’clock. They must 
not think that I am ill, or they will not go to the ball ; they 
will stop and take care of me. To-morrow Nasie will come 
and hold me in her arms as if I were one of her children ; 
her kisses will make me well again. After all, I might have 
spent the thousand francs on physic ; I would far rather give 
them to my little Nasie, who can charm all the pain away. 
At any rate, I am some comfort to her in her misery ; and 
that makes up for my unkindness in buying an annuity. She 
is in the depths, and I cannot draw her out of them now. 
Oh ! I will go into business again, I will buy wheat in Odessa ; 
out there, wheat fetches a quarter of the price it sells for here. 
There is a law against the importation of grain, but the good 
folk who made the law forgot to prohibit the introduction of 
wheat products and fogd stuffs made from corn. Hey ! 

hey ! That struck me this morning. There is a fine 

trade to be done in starch.” 

Eugene, watching the old man’s face, thought that his 
friend was light-headed. 

“Come,” he said, “do not talk any more, you must take 

rest ” Just then Bianchon came up, and Eugene went 

down to dinner. 

The two students sat up with him that night, relieving each 
other in turn. Bianchon brought up his medical books and 
studied ; Eugene wrote letters home to his mother and sisters. 
Next morning Bianchon thought the symptoms more hopeful, 
but the patient’s condition demanded continual attention, 
which the two students alone were willing to give — a task 
impossible to describe in the squeamish phraseology of the 
epoch. Leeches must be applied to the wasted body; the 
poultices, hot foot-baths, and other details of the treatment 
required the physical strength and devotion of the two 
young men. Mme. de Restaud did not come ; but she sent 
a messenger for the money. 


264 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


“I expected she would come herself; but it would have 
been a pity for her to come, she would have been anxious 
about me,” said the father, and to all appearance he was well 
content. 

At seven o’clock that evening Therese came with a letter 
from Delphine. 

“What are you doing, dear friend? I have been loved 
for a very little while, and am I neglected already ? In the 
confidences of heart and heart, I have learned to know your 
soul — you are too noble not to be faithful for ever, for you 
know that love with all its infinite subtle changes of feelings 
is never the same. Once you said, as we were listening to 
the prayer in ‘ Mose in Egitto,’ ‘ For some it is the monotony 
of a single note; for others, it is the infinite of sound.’ 
Remember that I am expecting you this evening to take me 
to Mme. de Beauseant’s ball. Every one knows now that 
the king signed M. d’Ajuda’s marriage-contract this morning, 
and the poor Vicomtesse knew nothing of it until two o’clock 
this afternoon. All Paris will flock to her house, of course, 
just as a crowd fills the Place de Greve to see an execution. 
It is horrible, is it not, to go out of curiosity to see if she will 
hide her anguish, and whether she will die courageously ? I 
certainly should not go, my friend, if I had been at her house 
before ; but, of course, she will not receive society any more 
after this, and all my efforts would be in vain. My position 
is a very unusual one, and, besides, I am going there partly 
on your account. I am waiting for you. If you are not 
beside me in less than two hours, I do not know whether I 
could forgive such treason.” 

Rastignac took up a pen and wrote — 

“ I am waiting till the doctor comes to know if there rs 
any hope of your father’s life. He is lying dangerously ill. 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


265 


I will come and bring you the news, but I am afraid it may 
be a sentence of death. When I come you can decide whether 
you can go to the ball. Yours a thousand times.” 

At half-past eight the doctor arrived. He did not take a 
very hopeful view of the case, but thought that there was no 
immediate danger. Improvements and relapses might be 
expected, and the good man’s life and reason hung in the 
balance. 

“It would be better for him to die at once,” the doctor 
said as he took leave. 

Eugene left Goriot to Bianchon’s care, and went to carry 
the sad news to Mme. de Nucingen. Family feeling lingered 
in her, and this must put an end for the present to her plans 
of amusement. 

“ Tell her to enjoy her evening as if nothing had happened,” 
cried Goriot. He had been lying in a sort of stupor, but he 
suddenly sat upright as Eugene went out. 

Eugene, half-heartbroken, entered Delphine’s room. Her 
hair had been dressed ; she wore her dancing slippers ; she 
had only to put on her ball-dress ; but when the artist is 
giving the finishing stroke to his creation, the last touches 
require more time than the whole ground-work of the picture. 

“ Why ! you are not dressed ! ” she cried. 

“Madame, your father ” 

“ My father again ! ” she exclaimed, breaking in upon him. 
“ You need not teach me what is due to my father, I have known 
my father this long while. Not a word, Eugene. I will hear 
what you have to say when you are dressed. My carriage is 
waiting, take it, go round to your rooms and dress, Therese 
has put out everything in readiness for you. Come back as 
soon as you can ; we will talk about my father on the way to 
Mme. de Beaus6ant’s. We must go early; if we have to wait 
our turn in a row of carriages, we shall be lucky if we get 
there by eleven o’clock.” 


266 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


“ Madame ” 

“ Quick ! not a word ! 99 she cried, darting into hex dress- 
ing-room for a necklace. 

“ Do go, Monsieur Eugene, or you will vex madame,” said 
Therese, hurrying him away ; and Eugene was too horror- 
stricken by this elegant parricide to resist. 

He went to his rooms and dressed, sad, thoughtful, and 
dispirited. The world of Paris was like an ocean of mud for 
him just then ; and it seemed that whoever set foot in that 
black mire must needs sink into it up to the chin. 

“Their crimes are paltry,” said Eugene to himself. “ Vau- 
trin was greater.” 

He had seen society in its three great phases — obedience, 
struggle, and revolt; the family, the world, and Vautrin ; and 
he hesitated in his choice. Obedience was dull, revolt im- 
possible, struggle hazardous. His thoughts wandered back to 
the home circle. He thought of the quiet uneventful life, the 
pure happiness of the days spent among those who loved him 
there. Those loving and beloved beings passed their lives in 
obedience to the natural laws of the hearth, and in that obedi- 
ence found a deep and constant serenity, unvexed by torments 
such as these. Yet, for all his good impulses, he could not 
bring himself to make profession of the religion of pure souls 
to Delphine, nor to prescribe the duties of piety to her in the 
name of love. His education had begun to bear its fruits ; 
he loved selfishly already. Besides, his tact had discovered 
to him the real nature of Delphine ; he divined instinctively 
that she was capable of stepping over her father’s corpse to 
go to the ball ; and within himself he felt that he had neither 
the strength of mind to play the part of mentor, nor the 
strength of character to vex her, nor the courage to leave her 
to go alone. 

“ She would never forgive me for putting her in the wrong 
over it,” he said to himself. Then he turned the doctor’s 
dictum over in his mind ; he tried to believe that Goriot was 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


267 


not so dangerously ill as he had imagined, and ended by 
collecting together a sufficient quantity of traitorous excuses 
for Delphine’s conduct. She did not know how ill her father 
was ; the kind old man himself would have made her go to 
the ball if she had gone to see him. So often it happens that 
this one or that stands condemned by the social laws that 
govern family relations ; and yet there are peculiar circum- 
stances in the case, differences of temperament, divergent 
interests, innumerable complications of family life that excuse 
the apparent offense. 

Eugene did not wish to see too clearly ; he was ready to 
sacrifice his conscience to his mistress. Within the last few 
days his whole life had undergone a change. Woman had 
entered into his world and thrown it into chaos, family 
claims dwindled away before her ; she had appropriated all 
his being to her uses. Rastignac and Delphine found each 
other at a crisis in their lives when their union gave them the 
most poignant bliss. Their passion, so long proved, had 
only gained in strength by the gratified desire that often 
extinguishes passion. This woman was his, and Eugene 
recognized that not until then had he -oved her ; perhaps 
love is only gratitude for pleasure. This woman, vile or sub- 
lime, he adored for the pleasures she had brought as her 
dower ; and Delphine loved Rastignac as Tantalus would 
have loved some angel who had satisfied his hunger and 
quenched the burning thirst in his parched throat. 

“Well,” said Mme. de Nucingen when he came back in 
evening dress, “ how is my father? ” 

“Very dangerously ill,” he answered ; “ if you will grant 
me a proof of your affection, we will just go in to see him 
on the way.” 

“Very well,” she said. “Yes, but afterwards. Dear 
Eugene, do be nice, and don’t preach to me. Come.” 

They set out for the ball. Eugene said nothing for a while, 
apparently absorbed in deep meditation. 


268 


FATHER GO RIOT 


u What is it now? ” she asked. 

“1 can hear the death-rattle in your father’s throat,” he 
said, almost angrily. And with the hot indignation of youth, 
he told the story of Mme. de Restaud’s vanity and cruelty, of 
her father’s final act of self-sacrifice, that had brought about 
this struggle between life and death, of the price that had 
been paid for Anastasie’s golden embroideries. Delphine 
cried. 

“ I shall look frightful,” she thought. She dried her tears. 

“ I will nurse my father; I will not leave his bedside,” she 
said aloud. 

“ Ah ! now you are as I would have you,” exclaimed 
Rastignac. 

The lamps of five hundred carriages lit up the darkness 
about the Hotel de Beauseant. A gendarme in all the glory 
of his uniform stood on either side of the brightly lighted 
gateway. The great world was flocking thither that night in 
its eager curiosity to see the great lady at the moment of her 
fall, and the rooms on the ground floor were already full to 
overflowing, when Mme. de Nucingen and Rastignac appeared. 
Never since Louis XIV. tore her lover away from La Grande 
Mademoiselle, and the whole court hastened to visit that 
unfortunate princess, had a disastrous love affair made such a 
sensation in Paris. But the youngest daughter of the almost 
royal house of Burgundy had risen proudly above her pain, 
and moved till the last moment like a queen in this world — 
its vanities had always been valueless for her, save in so far as 
they contributed to the triumph of her passion. The salons 
were filled with the most beautiful women in Paris, resplendent 
in their toilets, and radiant with smiles. Ministers and 
ambassadors, the most distinguished men at court, men be- 
dizened with decorations, stars, and ribbons, men who bore 
the most illustrious names in France, had gathered about the 
Vicomtesse. 

The music of the orchestra vibrated in wave after wave of 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


269 


sound from the golden ceiling of the palace, now made deso- 
late for its queen. 

Madame de Beauseant stood at the door of the first salon 
to receive the guests who were styled her friends. She was 
dressed in white, and wore no ornament in the plaits of 
hair braided about her head ; her face was calm ; there was 
no sign there of pride, nor of pain, nor of joy that she did 
not feel. No one could read her soul ; she stood there like 
some Niobe carved in marble. For a few intimate friends 
there was a tinge of satire in her smile ; but no scrutiny saw 
any change in her, nor had she looked otherwise in the days 
of the glory of her happiness. The most callous of her guests 
admired her as young Rome applauded some gladiator who 
could die smiling. It seemed as if society had adorned itself 
for a last audience of one of its sovereigns. 

“ I was afraid that you would not come,” she said to Ras- 
tignac. 

“Madame,” he said, in an unsteady voice, taking her 
speech as a reproach, “ I shall be the last to go, that is why I 
am here.” 

“Good,” she said, and she took his hand. “You are per- 
haps the only one that I can trust here among all these. Oh, 
my friend, when you love, love a woman whom you are sure 
that you can love always. Never forsake a woman.” 

She took Rastignac’s arm, and went towards a sofa in the 
card-room. 

“I want you to go to the Marquis,” she said. “Jacques, 
my footman, will go with you ; he has a letter that you will 
take. I am asking the Marquis to give my letters back to me. 
He will give them all up, I like to think that. When you 
have my letters, go up to my room with them. Some one 
shall bring me word.” 

She rose to go to meet the Duchesse de Langeais, her most 
intimate friend, who had come like the rest of the world. 

Rastignac went. He asked for the Marquis d’Ajuda at the 


270 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


Hotel Rochefide, feeling certain that the latter would be 
spending his evening there, and so it proved. The Marquis 
went to his own house with Rastignac, and gave a casket to 
the student, saying as he did so, “ They are all there.” 

He seemed as if he was about to say something to Eugene* 
to ask about the ball, or the Vicomtesse ; perhaps he was on 
the brink of the confession that, even then, he was in despair, 
and knew that his marriage would be a fatal mistake ; but a 
proud gleam shone in his eyes, and with deplorable courage 
he kept his noblest feelings a secret. 

“ Do not even mention my name to her, my dear Eugene.” 
He grasped Rastignac’s hand sadly and affectionately, and 
turned away from him. Eugene went back to the Hotel 
Beaus6ant, the servant took him to the Vicomtesse’s room. 
There were signs there of preparations for a journey. He sat 
down by the fire, fixed his eyes on the cedar-wood casket, and 
fell into deep mournful musings. Mme. de Beauseant loomed 
up largely in these imaginings, like a goddess in the Iliad. 

“Ah ! my friend ! ” said the Vicomtesse; she crossed 

the room and laid her hand on Rastignac’s shoulder. He 
saw the tears in his cousin’s uplifted eyes, saw that one hand 
was raised to take the casket, and that the fingers of the other 
trembled. Suddenly she took the casket, put it in the fire, 
and watched it burn. 

“They are dancing,” she said. “They all came very 
early ; but death will belong in coming. Hush ! my friend,” 
and she laid a finger on Rastignac’s lips, seeing that he was 
about to speak. “ I shall never see Paris again. I am taking 
my leave of this world. At five o’clock this morning I shall 
set out on my journey ; I mean to bury myself in the re- 
motest part of Normandy. I have had very little time to 
make my arrangements ; since three o’clock this afternoon 
I have been busy signing documents, setting my affairs in 
order; there was no one whom I could send to ” 

She broke off. 


FATHER GO RIOT 


271 


“ He was sure to be ” 

Again she broke off; the weight of her sorrow was more 
than she could bear. In such moments as these everything 
is agony, and some words are impossible to utter. 

“And so I counted upon you to do me this last piece 
of service this evening,” she said. “I should like to give 
you some pledge of friendship. I shall often think of you. 
You have seemed to me to be kind and noble, fresh-hearted 
and true, in this world where such qualities are seldom 
found. I should like you to think sometimes of me. Stay,” 
she said, glancing about her, “ there is this box that has held 
my gloves. Every time I opened it before going to a ball or 
to the theatre, I used to feel that I must be beautiful, because 
I was so happy ; and I never touched it except to lay some 
gracious memory in it : there is so much of my old self in it, 
of a Madame de Beauseant who now lives no longer. Will 
you take it? I will leave directions that it is to be sent to 
you in the Rue d’Artois. Mme. de Nucingen looked very 
charming this evening. Eugene, you must love her. Perhaps 
we may never see each other again, my friend ; but be sure 
of this, that I shall pray for you who have been kind to 
me. Now let us go downstairs. People shall not think that 
I am weeping. I have all time and eternity before me, and 
where I am going I shall be alone, and no one will ask me the 
reason of my tears. One last look round first.” 

She stood for a moment. Then she covered her eyes with 
her hands for an instant, dashed away the tears, bathed her face 
with cold water, and took the student’s arm. 

“ Let us go ! ” she said. 

This suffering, endured with such noble fortitude, shook 
Eugene with a more violent emotion than he had felt before. 
They went back to the ballroom, and Mme. de Beauseant 
went through the rooms on Eugene’s arm — the last delicately 
gracious act of a gracious woman. In another moment he 
saw the sisters, Mme. de Restaud and Mme. de Nucingen. 


272 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


The Countess shone in all the glory of her magnificent 
diamonds ; every stone must have scorched like fire, she 
was never to wear them again. Strong as love and pride 
might be in her, she found it difficult to meet her husband’s 
eyes. The sight of her was scarcely calculated to lighten 
Rastignac’s sad thoughts ; through the blaze of those diamonds 
he seemed to see the wretched pallet-bed on which Father 
Goriot was lying. The Vicomtesse misread his melancholy; 
she withdrew her hand from his arm. 

“ Come,” she said to him, “ I must not deprive you of a 
pleasure.” 

Eugene was soon claimed by Delphine. She was delighted 
with the Impression that she had made, and eager to lay at 
her lover’s feet the homage she had received in this new 
world in which she hoped to live and move, henceforth, a con- 
spicuous figure. 

“ What do you think of Nasie ? ” she asked him. 

“ She has discounted everything, even her own father’s 
death,” said Rastignac. 

Towards four o’clock in the morning the rooms began to 
empty. A little later the music ceased, and the Duchesse de 
Langeais and Rastignac were left in the great ballroom. The 
Vicomtesse, who thought to find the student there alone, 
came back there at the last. She had taken leave of M. de 
Beaus6ant, who had gone off to bed, saying again as he went, 
“ It is a great pity, my dear, to shut yourself up at your age ! 
Pray stay among us.” 

Mme. de Beauseant saw the Duchess, and, in spite of her- 
self, an exclamation broke from her. / 

“ I saw how it was, Clara,” said Mme. de Langeais. “ You 
are going from among us, and you will never come back. 
But you must not go until you have heard me, until we have 
understood each other.” 

She took her friend’s arm, and they went together into the 
next room. There the Duchess looked at her with tears in 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


273 


her eyes ; she held her friend in a close embrace, and kissed 
her cheek. 

“ I could not let you go without a word, dearest; the re- 
morse would have been too hard to bear. You can count upon 
me as surely as upon yourself. You have shown yourself great 
this evening ; I feel that I am worthy of your friendship, and 
I mean to prove myself worthy of it. I have not always been 
kind ; I was in the wrong ; forgive me, dearest ; I wish I 
could unsay anything that may have hurt you ; I take back 
those words. One common sorrow has brought us together 
again, for I do not know which of us is the more miserable. 
M. de Montriveau was not here to-night ; do you understand 
what that means? None of those who saw you to-night, 
Clara, will ever forget you. I mean to make one last effort. 
If I fail, I shall go into a convent. Clara, where are you 
going?" 

“Into Normandy, to Courcelles. I shall love and pray 
there until the day when God shall take me from this 
world. M. de Rastignac ! ’’ called the Vicomtesse, in a 
tremulous voice, remembering that the young man was 
waiting there. 

The student knelt to kiss his cousin’s hand. 

“ Good-by, Antoinette ! ’’ said Mme. de Beaus£ant. “ May 
you be happy." She turned to the student. “You are 
young," she said; “ you have some beliefs still left. I have 
been privileged, like some dying people, to find sincere and 
reverent feeling in those about me as I take my leave of this 
world." 

It was nearly five o’clock that morning when Rastignac 
came away. He had put Mme. de Beauseant into her trav- 
eling carriage, and received her last farewells, spoken amid 
fast-falling tears ; for no greatness is so great that it can rise 
above the laws of human affection, or live beyond the juris- 
diction of pain, as certain demagogues would have the people 
believe. Eugene returned on foot to the Maison Vauquer 
18 


274 


FATHER G OR 10 T. 


through the cold and darkness. His education was nearly 
complete. 

“ There is no hope for poor Father Goriot,” said Bianchon, 
as Rastignac came into the room. Eugene looked for a while 
at the sleeping man, then he turned to his friend. “ Dear 
fellow, you are content with the modest career you have 
marked out for yourself ; keep to it. I am in hell, and I 
must stay there. Believe everything that you hear said of 
the world, nothing is too impossibly bad. No Juvenal could 
paint the horrors hidden away under the covering of gems 
and gold.” 

At two o’clock in the afternoon Bianchon came to wake 
Rastignac, and begged him to take charge of Goriot, who had 
grown worse as the day wore on. The medical student was 
obliged to go out. 

“ Poor old man, he has not two days to live, maybe not 
many hours,” he said ; “ but we must do our utmost, all the 
same, to fight the disease. It will be a very troublesome case, 
and we shall want money. We can nurse him between us, 
of course, but, for my own part, I have not a penny. I have 
turned out his pockets, and rummaged through his drawers — 
result, nix. I asked him about it while his mind was clear, 
and he told me he had not a farthing of his own. What have 
you?” 

“ I have twenty francs left,” said Rastignac; “but I will 
take them to the roulette table, I shall be sure to win.” 

“ And if you lose ? ” 

“ Then I shall go to his sons-in-law and his daughters and 
ask them for money.” 

“And suppose they refuse?” Bianchon retorted. “The 
most pressing thing just now is not really money ; we must 
put mustard poultices, as hot as they can be made, on his 
feet and legs. If he calls out, there is still some hope for 
him. You know how to set about doing it, and, besides, 
Christophe will help you. I am going round to the dispen- 


FATHER GO RIOT 


275 


sary to persuade them to let us have the things we want on 
credit. It is a pity that we could not move him to the hos- 
pital ; poor fellow, he would be better there. Well, come 
along, I leave you in charge ; you must stay with him till I 
come back.” 

The two young men went back to the room where the old 
man was lying. Eugene was startled at the change in Goriot’s 
face, so livid, distorted, and feeble. 

“ How are you, papa ? ” he said, bending over the pallet- 
bed. Goriot turned his dull eyes upon Eugene, looked at 
him attentively, and did not recognize him. It was more 
than the student could bear; the tears came into his eyes. 

“ Bianchon, ought we to have curtains put up in the 
windows ? ” 

“No, the temperature and the light do not affect him now. 
It would be a good thing for him if he felt heat or cold ; but 
we must have a fire in any case to make tisanes and heat the 
other things. I will send round a few sticks ; they will last 
till we can have in some firewood. I burned all the bark 
fuel you had left, as well as his, poor man, yesterday and 
during the night. The place was so damp that the water 
stood in drops on the walls; I could hardly get the room dry. 
Christophe came in and swept the floor, but the place is like 
a stable ; I had to burn juniper, the smell was something 
horrible.” 

“My God!” said Rastignac. “To think of those 
daughters of his.” 

“ One moment, if he asks for something to drink, give him 
this,” said the house student, pointing to a large white jar. 
“ If he begins to groan, and the belly feels hot and hard to the 
touch, you know what to do ; get Christophe to help you. If 
he should happen to grow much excited, and begin to talk a 
good deal, and even to ramble in his talk, do not be alarmed. 
It would not be a bad symptom. But send Christophe to the 
Hospice Cochin. Our doctor, my chum, or I will come and 


276 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


apply moxas. We had a great consultation this morning 
while you were asleep. A surgeon, a pupil of Gall’s, came, 
and our house surgeon, and the head physician from the 
Hotel-Dieu. Those gentlemen considered that the symptoms 
were very unusual and interesting ; the case must be carefully 
watched, for it throws a light on several obscure and rather 
important scientific problems. One of the authorities says 
that if there is more pressure of serum on one or other portion 
of the brain, it should affect his mental capacities in such and 
such directions. So if he should talk, notice very carefully 
what kind of ideas his mind seems to run on ; whether 
memory, or penetration, or the reasoning faculties are exer- 
cised ; whether sentiments or practical questions fill his 
thoughts ; whether he makes forecasts or dwells on the past ; 
in fact, you must be prepared to give an accurate report of 
him. It is quite likely that the extravasation fills the whole 
brain, in which case he will die in the imbecile state in which 
he is lying now. You cannot tell anything about these mys- 
terious nervous diseases. Suppose the crash came here,” said 
Bianchon, touching the back of the head, “very strange 
things have been known to happen ; the brain sometimes 
partially recovers, and death is delayed. Or the congested 
matter may pass out of the brain altogether through channels 
which can only be determined by a post-mortem examination. 
There is an old man at the Hospital for Incurables, an imbe- 
cile patient, in his case the effusion has followed the direction 
of the spinal cord; he suffers the most horrible agonies, but 
still he lives.” 

“ Did they enjoy themselves?” It was Father Goriot who 
spoke. He had recognized Eugene. 

“ Oh ! he thinks of nothing but his daughters,” said Bian- 
chon. “ Scores of times last night he said to me, ‘ They are 
dancing now ! She has her dress.’ He called them by 
their names. He made me cry, the devil take it, calling with 
that tone in his voice, for ‘ Delphine ! my little Delphine ! 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


277 


and Nasie ! * Upon my word,” said the medical student, 
“ it was enough to make any one burst out crying.” 

“ Delphine,” said the old man, “ she is there, isn’t she? I 
knew she was there,” and his eyes sought the door. 

“I am going down now to tell Sylvie to get the poultices 
ready,” said Bianchon. “They ought to go on at once.” 

Rastignac was left alone with the old man. He sat at the 
foot of the bed, and gazed at the face before him, so horribly 
changed that it was shocking to see. 

“Noble natures cannot dwell in this world,” he said; 
“ Mme. de Beauseant has fled from it, and there he lies dying. 
What place indeed is there in the shallow, petty, frivolous 
thing called society, for noble thoughts and feelings?” 

Pictures of yesterday’s ball rose up in his memory, in 
strange contrast to the death-bed scene before him. Bianchon 
suddenly appeared. 

“I say, Eugene, I have just seen our head surgeon at the 
hospital, and I ran all the way back here. If the old man 
shows any signs of reason, if he begins to talk, cover him with 
a mustard poultice from the neck to the base of the spine, and 
send round for us.” 

“ Dear Bianchon,” exclaimed Eugene. 

“ Oh ! it is an interesting case from a scientific point of 
view,” said the medical student, with all the enthusiasm of a 
neophyte. 

“So!” said Eugene. “Am I really the only one who 
cares for the poor old man for his own sake ? ” 

“You would not have said so if you had seen me this 
morning,” returned Bianchon, who did not take offense 
at this speech. “ Doctors who have seen a good deal of 
practice never see anything but the disease, but, my dear fel- 
low, I can see the patient still.” 

He went. Eugene was left alone with the old man, and 
with an apprehension of a crisis that set in, in fact, before 
very long. 


278 


FATHER G OR 10 7: 


u Ah ! dear boy, is that you? ” said Father Goriot, recog- 
nizing Eugene. 

“ Did you feel better?” asked the law student, taking his 
hand. 

“ Yes. My head felt as if it were being screwed in a vise, 
but now it is set free again. Did you see my girls ? They 
will be here directly ; as soon as they know that I am ill they 
will hurry here at once ; they used to take such care of me in 
the Rue de la Jussienne ! Great heavens ! if only my room 
was fit for them to come into ! There has been a young man 
here, who has burned up all my bark fuel.” 

“ lean hear Christophe coming upstairs,” Eugene answered. 
“ He is bringing up some firewood that that young man has 
sent you.” 

“ Good, but how am I to pay for the wood ? I have not a 
penny left, dear boy. I have given everything, everything. 
I am a pauper now. Well, at least the golden gown was 
grand, was it not ? (Ah ! what pain this is !) Thanks, 
Christophe ! God will reward you, my boy ; I have nothing 
left now.” 

Eugene went over to Christophe and whispered in the 
man’s ear, “ I will pay you well, and Sylvie too, for your 
trouble.” 

“ My daughters told you that they were coming, didn’t 
they, Christophe? Go again to them, and I will give you 
five francs. Tell them that I am not feeling well, that I 
should like to kiss them both and see them once again before 
I die. Tell them that, but don’t alarm them more than you 
can help.” 

Rastignac signed to Christophe to go, and the man hur- 
riedly departed. 

“ They will come before long,” the old man went on. “ I 
know them so well. My tender-hearted Delphine ! If I am 
going to die, she will feel it so much ! And so will Nasie. 
I do not want to die ; they will cry if I die ; and if I die, 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


279 


dear Eugene, I shall not see them any more. It will be very 
dreary there where I am going. For a father it is hell to be 
without your children ; I have served my apprenticeship 
already since they married. My heaven was in the Rue de la 
Jussienne. Eugene, do you think that if I go to heaven I 
could come back to earth, and be near them in spirit ? I 
have heard some such things said. Is it true ? It is as if I 
could see them at this moment as they used to be when we all 
lived in the Rue de la Jussienne. They used to come down- 
stairs of a morning. * Good-morning, papa ! ’ they used to 
say ; and I would take them on my knees ; we had all sorts of 
little games of play together, and they had such pretty coax- 
ing ways. We always had breakfast together, too, every 
morning, and they had dinner with me — in fact, I was a 
father then. I enjoyed my children. They did not think for 
themselves so long as they lived in the Rue de la Jussienne ; 
they knew nothing of the world ; they loved me with all their 
hearts. Mon Dieu / why could they not always be little 
girls ? (Oh ! my head ! this racking pain in my head !) Ah ! 
ah ! forgive me, children ; this pain is fearful ; it must be 
agony indeed, for you have used me to endure pain. Mon 
Dieu ! if only I held their hands in mine, I should not feel it 
at all. Do you think that they are on the way ? Christophe 
is so stupid; I ought to have gone myself. Afewill see them. 
But you went to the ball yesterday; just tell me how they 
looked. They did not know that I was ill, did they, or they 
would not have been dancing, poor little things ? Oh ! I 
must not be ill any longer. They stand too much in need of 
me ; their fortunes are in danger. And such husbands as 
they are bound to ! I must get well ! (Oh ! what pain this 

is ! what pain this is ! ah ! ah !) I must get well, you see ; 

for they must have money, and I know how to set about mak- 
ing some. I will go to Odessa and manufacture starch there. 

I am an old hand, I will make millions. (Oh ! this is 
agony !) ” 


K 


280 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


Goriot was silent for a moment ; it seemed to require his 
whole strength to endure the pain. 

“ If they were here, I should not complain,” he said. 
“ So why should I complain now ? ” 

He seemed to grow drowsy with exhaustion, and lay quietly 
for a long time. Christophe came back ; and Rastignac, 
thinking that Goriot was asleep, allowed the man to give his 
story aloud. 

“ First of all, sir, I went to Madame la Comtesse,” he 
said ; “ but she and her husband were so busy that I couldn’t 
get to speak to her. When I insisted that I must see her, 
M. de Restaud came out to me himself, and went on like this 
— ‘ M. Goriot is dying, is he ? Very well, it is the best thing 
he can do. I want Mme. de Restaud to transact some import- 
ant business, when it is all finished she can go.’ The gentle- 
man looked angry, I thought. I was just going away when 
Mme. de Restaud came out into an ante-chamber through a 
door that I did not notice, and said, ‘ Christophe, tell my 
father that my husband wants me to discuss some matters with 
him, and I cannot leave the house, the life or death of my 
children is at stake ; but as soon as it is over, I will come.’ 
As for Madame la Baronne, that is another story ! I could 
not speak to her either, and I did not even see her. Her 
waiting-woman said, ‘Ah, yes, but madame only came back 
from a ball at a quarter to five this morning; she is asleep 
now, and if I wake her before mid-day she will be cross. As 
soon as she rings, I will go and tell her that her father is 
worse. It will be time enough then to tell her bad news ! ’ 

I begged and I prayed, but, there ! it was no good. Then I 
asked for M. le Baron, but he was out.” 

“To think that neither of his daughters should come!” 
exclaimed Rastignac. “ I will write to them both.” 

“ Neither of them ! ” cried the old man, sitting upright in 
bed. “They are busy, they are asleep, they will not come! I 
knew that they would not. Not until you are dying do you 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


281 


know your children Oh ! my friend, do not marry ; do 

not have children I You give them life ; they give you your 
death-blow. You bring them into the world, and they send 
you out of it. No, they will not come. I have known that 
these ten years. Sometimes I have told myself so, but I did 
not dare to believe it.” 

The tears gathered and stood without overflowing the red 
sockets. 

“Ah ! if I were rich still, if I had kept my money, if I 
had not given all to them, they would be with me now; 
they would fawn on me and cover my cheeks with their kisses ! 
I should be living in a great mansion ; I should have grand 
apartments and servants and a fire in my room ; and they 
would be about me all in tears, and their husbands and their 
children. I should have had all that ; now, I have nothing. 
Money brings everything to you ; even your daughters. My 
money. Oh! where is my money? If I had plenty of 
money to leave behind me, they would nurse me and tend 
me ; I should hear their voices, I should see their faces. Ah, 
God ! who knows? They both of them have hearts of stone. 
I loved them too much ; it was not likely that they should 
love me. A father ought always to be rich ; he ought to keep 
his children well in hand, like unruly horses. I have gone 
down on my knees to them. Wretches ! this is the crowning 
act that brings the last ten years to a proper close. If you 
but knew how much they made of me just after they were mar- 
ried. (Oh ! this is cruel torture !) I had just given them each 
eight hundred thousand francs ; they were d)ound to be civil 
to me after that, and their husbands too were civil. I used 
to go to their houses ; it was, ‘ My kind father ’ here, 4 My 
dear father ’ there. There was always a place for me at their 
tables. I used to dine with their husbands now and then, and 
they were very respectful to me. I was still worth something, 
they thought. How should they know? I have not said any- 
thing about my affairs. It is worth while to be civil to a man 


282 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


who has given his daughters eight hundred thousand francs 
apiece ; and they showed me every attention then — but it 
was all for my money. Grand people are not great. I found 
that out by experience ! I went to the theatre with them in 
their carriage ; I might stay as long as I cared to stay at their 
evening parties. In fact, they acknowledged me as their father ; 
publicly they owned that they were my daughters. But I was 
always a shrewd one, you see, and nothing was lost upon me. 

Everything went straight to the mark and pierced my heart. 

♦ 

I saw quite well that it was all sham and pretense, but there 
is no help for such things as these. I felt less at my 
ease at their dinner table than I did downstairs here. I 
had nothing to say for myself. So these grand folks would 
ask in my son-in-law’s ear, ‘ Who may that gentleman be? ’ 
‘The father-in-law with the dollars ; he is very rich.’ ‘The 
devil he is ! ’ they would say, and look again at me with the 
respect due to my money. Well, if I was in the way some- 
times, I paid dearly for my mistakes. And, besides, who is 
perfect? (My head is one sore !) Dear Monsieur Eugene, I 
am suffering so now, that a man might die of the pain ; but 
it is nothing, nothing to be compared with the pain I endured 
when Anastasie made me feel, for the first time, that I had 
said something stupid. She looked at me, and that glance 
of hers opened all my veins. I used to want to know every- 
thing, to be learned ; and one thing I did learn thoroughly 
— I knew that I was not wanted here on earth. 

“The next day I went to Delphine for comfort, and what 
should I do there but make some stupid blunder that made 
her angry with me. I was like one driven out of his senses. 
For a week I did not know what to do ; I did not dare to go 
to see them for fear they should reproach me. And that was 
how they both turned me out of the house. 

“Oh, God! Thou knowest all the misery and anguish 
that I have endured ; Thou hast counted all the wounds that 
have been dealt to me in these years that have aged and 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


283 


changed me and whitened my hair and drained my life ; why 
dost Thou make me to suffer so to-day? Have I not more 
than expiated the sin of loving them too much ? They them- 
selves have been the instruments of vengeance ; they have 
tortured me for my sin of affection. 

“Ah, well! fathers know no better; I loved them so; I 
went back to them as a gambler goes to the gaming-table. 
This love was my vice, you see, my mistress — they were every- 
thing in the world to me. They were always wanting some- 
thing or other, dresses and ornaments, and what not ; their 
maids used to tell me what they wanted, and I used to give 
them the things for the sake of the welcome that they bought 
for me. But, at the same time, they used to give me little 
lectures on my behavior in society ; they began about it at 
once. Then they began to feel ashamed of me. That is 
what comes of having your children well brought up. I could 
not go to school again at my time of life. (This pain is fear- 
ful ! Mon Dieu! These doctors! these doctors! If they 
would open my head, it would give me some relief!) Oh, 
my daughters, my daughters ! Anastasie ! Delphine ! If I 
could only see them ! Send for the police, and make them 
come to me ! Justice is on my side, the whole world is on 
my side, I have natural rights, and the law with me. I pro- 
test ! The country will go to ruin if a father’s rights are 
trampled underfoot. That is easy to see. The whole world 
turns on fatherly love; fatherly love is the foundation of so- 
ciety; it will crumble into ruin when children do not love 
their fathers. Oh ! if I could only see them, and hear them, 
no matter what they said ; if I could simply hear their voices, 
it would soothe the pain. Delphine ! Delphine most of all. 
But tell them when they come not to look so coldly at me as 
they do. Oh ! my friend, my good Monsieur Eugene, you 
do not know what it is when all the golden light in a glance 
suddenly turns to a leaden gray. It has been one long winter 
here since the light in their eyes shone no more for me. I 


284 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


have had nothing but disappointments to devour. Disap- 
pointment has been my daily bread ; I have lived on humilia- 
tion and insults. I have swallowed down all the affronts for 
which they sold me my poor stealthy little moments of joy ; 
for I love them so ! Think of it ! a father hiding himself to 
get a glimpse of his children ! I have given all my life to 
them, and to-day they will not give me an hour ! I am hun- 
gering and thirsting for them, my heart is burning in me, but 
they will not come to bring relief in the agony, for I am dying 
now, I feel that this is death. Do they not know what it 
means to trample on a father’s corpse? There is a God in 
heaven who avenges us fathers whether we will or not. 

“ Oh ! they will come ! Come to me, darlings, and give 
me one more kiss ; one last kiss, the Viaticum for your father, 
who will pray God for you in heaven. I will tell Him that 
you have been good children to your father, and plead your 
cause with God ! After all, it is not their fault. I tell you 
they are innocent, my friend. Tell every one that it is not 
their fault, and no one need be distressed on my account. It 
is all my own fault, I taught them to trample upon me. I 
loved to have it so. It is no one’s affair but mine; man’s 
justice and God’s justice have nothing to do in it. God 
would be unjust if He condemned them for anything they 
may have done to me. I did not behave to them properly ; 
I was stupid enough to resign my rights. I would have hum- 
bled myself in the dust for them. What could you expect ? 
The most beautiful nature, the noblest soul, would have been 
spoiled by such indulgence. I am a wretch, I am justly pun- 
ished. I, and I only, am to blame for all their sins ; I spoiled 
them. To-day they are as eager for pleasure as they used to 
be for sugar-plums. When they were little girls I indulged 
them in every whim. They had a carriage of their own when 
they were fifteen. They have never been crossed. I am guilty, 
and not they — but I sinned through love. 

“ My heart would open at the sound of their voices. I can 


FATHER GORIOT. 


285 


hear them ; they are coming. Yes ! yes ! they are coming. 
The law demands that they should be present at their father’s 
death-bed ; the law is on my side. It would only cost them 
the hire of a cab. I would pay that. Write to them, tell 
them that I have millions to leave to them ! On my word of 
honor, yes. I am going to manufacture Italian paste foods 
at Odessa. I understand the trade. There are millions to 
be made in it. Nobody has thought of the scheme as yet. 
You see, there will be no waste, no damage in transit, as there 
always is with wheat and flour. Hey ! hey ! and starch too ; 
there are millions to be made in the starch trade ! You will 
not be telling a lie. Millions, tell them ; and even if they 
really come because they covet the money, I would rather let 
them deceive me ; and I shall see them in any case. I want 
my children ! I gave them life ; they are mine, mine !” and 
he sat upright. The head thus raised, with its scanty white 
hair, seemed to Eugene like a threat ; every line that could 
still speak spoke of menace. 

“ There, there, dear father,” said Eugene, “ lie down 
again ; I will write to them at once. As soon as Bianchon 
comes back I will go for them myself, if they do not come 
before.” 

“ If they do not come?” repeated the old man, sobbing. 
“ Why, I shall be dead before then ; I shall die in a fit of 
rage, of rage ! Anger is getting the better of me. I can see 
my whole life at this minute. I have been cheated ! They 
do not love me — they have never loved me all their lives ! 
It is all clear to me. They have not come, and they will not 
come. The longer they put off their coming, the less they 
are likely to give me this joy. I know them. They have 
never cared to guess my disappointments, my sorrows, my 
wants ; they never cared to know my life ; they will have no 
presentiment of my death ; they do not even know the secret 
of my tenderness for them. Yes, I see it all now. I have 
laid my heart open so often that they take everything I do 


286 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


for them as a matter of course. They might have asked me 
for the very eyes out of my head, and I would have bidden 
them to pluck them out. They think that all fathers are like 
theirs. You should always make your value felt. Their own 
children will avenge me. Why, for their own sakes they 
should come to me ! Make them understand that they are 
laying up retribution for their own death-beds. All crimes 

are summed up in this one Go to them ; just tell them 

that if they stay away it will be parricide ! There is enough 
laid to their charge already without adding that to the list. 
Cry aloud as I do now, ‘ Nasie ! Delphine ! here ! Come to 
your father ; the father who has been so kind to you is lying 
ill ! ’ Not a sound ; no one comes ! Then am I to die like 
a dog? This is to be my reward— I am forsaken at the last. 
They are wicked, heartless women ; curses on them, I loathe 
them. I shall rise at night from my grave to curse them again ; 
for, after all, my friends, have I done wrong ! They are 

behaving very badly to me, eh ? What am I saying? Did 

you not tell me just now that Delphine was in the room? 

She is more tender-hearted than her sister Eugene, you 

are my son, you know. You will love her; be a father to 
her ! Her sister is very unhappy. And there are their for- 
tunes ! Ah, God ! I am dying, this anguish is almost more 
than I can bear ! Cut off my head ; leave me nothing but 
my heart.” 

“ Christophe ! ” shouted Eugene, alarmed by the way in 
which the old man moaned, and by his cries, “go for M. 
Bianchon, and send a cab here for me. I am going to fetch 
them, dear father; I will bring them back to you.” 

“ Make them come ! Compel them to come ! Call out the 
Guard, the military, anything and everything, but make them 
come ! ” He looked at Eugene, and a last gleam of intelli- 
gence shone in his eyes. “ Go to the authorities, to the 
public prosecutor, let them bring them here ; come they 
shall ! ” 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


287 


‘‘But you have cursed them.” 

“ Who said that ! ” said the old man in dull amazement. 
“ You know quite well that I love them, I adore them ! I 

shall be quite well again if I can see them Go for 

them, my good neighbor, my dear boy, you are kind-hearted; 
I wish I could repay you for your kindness, but I have noth- 
ing to give you now, save the blessing of a dying man. Ah ! 
if I could only see Delphine, to tell her to pay my debt to 
you. If the other cannot come, bring Delphine to me at 
any rate. Tell her that unless she comes, you will not love 
her any more. She is so fond of you that she will come 
to me then. Give me something to drink ! There is a 
fire in my bowels. Press something against my forehead ! 
If my daughters would lay their hands there, I think I 

should get better Mon Dicu / who will recover their 

money for them when I am gone ? I will manufacture 

vermicelli out in Odessa; I will go to Odessa for their sakes.” 

“ Here is something to drink,” said Eugene, supporting the 
dying man on his left arm, while he held a cup of tisane to 
Goriot’s lips. 

“ How you must love your own father and mother ! ” said 
the old man, and grasped the student’s hands in both of his. 
It was a feeble, trembling grasp. “ I am going to die ; I shall 
die without seeing my daughters ; do you understand? To 
be always thirsting, and never to drink ; that has been my 

life for the last ten years I have no daughters, my sons- 

in-law killed them. No, since their marriages they have been 
dead to me. Fathers should petition the Chambers to pass 
a law against marriage. If you love your daughters, do not 
let them marry. A son-in-law is a rascal who poisons a girl’s 
mind and contaminates her whole nature. Let us have no 
more marriages ! It robs us of our daughters ; we are left alone 
upon our death-beds, and they are not with us then. They 
ought to pass a law for dying fathers. This is awful ! It cries 
for vengeance ! They cannot come, because my sons-in-law 


288 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


forbid them ! Kill them ! Restaud and the Alsa- 

tian, kill them both ! They have murdered me between them; 

they Death or my daughters ! All ! it is too late, 

I am dying, and they are not here ! Dying without 

them! Nasie ! Fifine ! Why do you not come to me? 

Your papa is going ” 

“ Dear Father Goriot, calm yourself. There, there, lie 
quietly and rest ; don’t worry yourself, don’t think.” 

“ I shall not see them. Oh ! the agony of it ! ” 

“ You shall see them.” 

“Really?” cried the old man, still wandering. “Oh! 
shall I see them ; I shall see them and hear their voices. I 
shall die happy. Ah k well, after all, I do not wish to live ; 
I cannot stand this much longer ; this pain that grows worse 
and worse. But, oh ! to see them, to touch their dresses — 
ah ! nothing but their dresses, that is very little ; still, to feel 
something that belongs to them. Let me touch their hair 
with my fingers their hair ” 

His head fell back on the pillow, as if a sudden heavy 
blow had struck him down, but his hands groped feebly over 
the quilt, as if to find his daughters’ hair. 

“My blessing on them ” he said, making an effort, 

“my blessing ” 

H is voice died away. Just at that moment Bianchon 
came into the room. 

“ I met Christophe,” he said ; “ he is gone for your cab.” 

Then he looked at the patient, and raised the closed eyelids 
with his fingers. The two students saw how dead and lustre- 
less the eyes beneath had grown. 

“ He will not get over this, I am sure,” said Biancon. He 
felt the old man’s pulse, and laid a hand over his heart. 

“ The machinery works still ; more is the pity, in his state 
it would be better for him to die.” 

“ Ah ! my word, it would ! ” 

6< What is the matter with you ? You are as pale as death.” 


FATHER GORIOT. 


289 


“ Dear fellow, the moans and cries that I have just 

heard There is a God ! Ah ! yes, yes, there is a God, 

and He has made a better world for us, or this world of ours 
would be a nightmare. I could have cried like a child ; but 
this is too tragical, and I am sick at heart.” 

“We want a lot of things, you know; and where is the 
money to come from ? ” 

Rastignac took out his watch. 

“There, be quick and pawn it. I do not want to stop on 
the way to the Rue du Helder ; there is not a moment to 
lose, I am afraid, and I must wait here till Christophe comes 
back. I have not a farthing; I shall have to pay the cabman 
when I get home again.” 

Rastignac rushed down the stairs, and drove off to the Rue 
du Helder. The awful scene through which he had just 
passed quickened his imagination, and he grew fiercely indig- 
nant. He reached Mme. de Restaud’s house only to be told 
by the servant that his mistress could see no one. 

“But I have brought a message from her father, who is 
dying,” Rastignac told the man. 

“ The Count has given us the strictest orders, sir ” 

“ If it is M. de Restaud who has given the orders, tell him 
that his father-in-law is dying, and that I am here and must 
speak with him at once.” 

The men went. 

Eugene waited for a long while. “ Perhaps her father is 
dying at this moment,” he thought. 

Then the man came back, and Eugene followed him to the 
little drawing-room. M. de Restaud was standing before the 
fireless grate, and did not ask his visitor to seat himself. 

“ Monsieur le Comte,” said Rastignac, “ M. Goriot, your 
father-in-law, is lying at the point of death in a squalid den 
in the Latin Quarter. He has not a penny to pay for fire- 
wood ; he is expected to die at any moment, and keeps calling 

for his daughter ” 

19 


290 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


“ I feel very little affection for M. Goriot, sir, as you prob- 
ably are aware,” the Count answered coolly. ‘‘His char- 
acter has been compromised in connection with Mme. de 
Restaud; he is the author of the misfortunes that have embit- 
tered my life and troubled my peace of mind. It is a matter 
of perfect indifference to me if he lives or dies. Now you 
know my feelings with regard to him. Public opinion may 
blame me, but I care nothing for public opinion. Just now I 
have other and much more important matters to think about 
than the things that fools and chatterers may say about me. 
As for Mme. de Restaud, she cannot leave the house ; she is 
in no condition to do so. And, besides, I shall not allow her 
to leave it. Tell her father that as soon as she has done her 
duty by her husband and child she shall go to see him. If 
she has any love for her father, she can be free to go to him, 
if she chooses, in a few seconds ; it lies entirely with her ” 

“Monsieur le Comte, it is no business of mine to criticise 
your conduct ; you can do as you please with your wife, but 
may I count upon you keeping your word with me? Well, 
then, promise me to tell her that her father has not twenty- 
four hours to live ; that he looks in vain for her, and has 
cursed her already as he lies on his death-bed — that is all 
I ask.” 

“ You can tell her yourself,” the Count answered, impressed 
by the thrill of indignation in Eugene’s voice. 

The Count led the way to the room where his wife usually 
sat. She was drowned in tears, and lay crouching in the 
depths of an armchair, as if she were tired of life and longed 
to die. It was piteous to see her. Before venturing to look 
at Rastignac, she glanced at her husband in evident and 
abject terror that spoke of complete prostration of body and 
mind ; she seemed crushed by a tyranny both mental and 
physical. The Count jerked his head towards her ; she con- 
strued this as a permission to speak. 

“ I heard all that you said, monsieur. Tell my father that 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


291 


if he knew all he would forgive me I did not think there 

was such torture in the world as this ; it is more than I can 
endure, monsieur ! But I will not give way as long as I live," 
she said, turning to her husband. “ I am a mother. Tell 
my father that I have never sinned against him in spite of 
appearances ! ” she cried aloud in her despair. 

Eugene bowed to the husband and wife ; he guessed the 
meaning of the scene, and that this was a terrible crisis in the 
Countess’ life. M. de Restaud’s manner had told him that 
his errand was a fruitless one ; he saw that Anastasie had no 
longer any liberty of action. He came away amazed and 
bewildered, and hurried to Mme. de Nucingen. Delphine 
was in bed. 

“Poor dear Eugene, I am ill,” she said. “I caught cold 
after the ball, and I am afraid of pneumonia. I am waiting 
for the doctor to come.” 

“If you were at death’s door,” Eugene broke in, “you 
must be carried somehow to your father. He is calling for 
you. If you could hear the faintest of those cries, you 
would not feel ill any longer.” 

“ Eugene, I dare say my father is not quite so ill as you 
say; but I cannot bear to do anything that you do not 
approve, so I will do just as you wish. As for him , he would 
die of grief I know if I went out to see him and brought on 
a dangerous illness. Well, I will go as soon as I have seen 
the doctor. Ah ! ” she cried out, “ you are not wearing your 
• watch, how is that ? ’ ’ 

Eugene reddened. 

“ Eugene, Eugene ! if you have sold it already or lost it 
even Oh ! it would be very wrong of you ! ” 

The student bent over Delphine and said in her ear, “ Do 
you want to know ? Very well, then, you shall know. Your 
father has nothing left to pay for the shroud that they will lay 
him in this evening. Your watch has been pawned, for I had 
nothing either.” 


292 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


Delphine sprang out of bed, ran to her desk, and took out 
her purse. She gave it to Eugene, and rang the bell, crying — 

“ I will go, I will go at once, Eugene. Leave me, I will 
dress. Why, I should be an unnatural daughter ! Go back ; 
I will be there before you. Therese,” she called to the wait- 
ing-woman, “ask M. de Nucingen to come upstairs at once 
and speak to me.” 

Eugene was almost happy when he reached the Rue Neuve- 
Sainte-Genevieve ; he was so glad to bring the news to the 
dying man that one of his daughters was coming. He 
fumbled in Delphine’s purse for money, so as to dismiss the 
cab at once ; and discovered that the young, beautiful, and 
wealthy woman of fashion had only seventy francs in her 
private purse. He climbed the stairs and found Bianchon 
supporting Goriot, while the house surgeon from the hospital 
was applying moxas to the patient’s back — under the direction 
of the physician, it was the last expedient of science, and it 
was tried in vain. 

“Can you feel them?” asked the physician. But Goriot 
had caught sight of Rastignac, and answered, “They are 
coming, are they not ? ” 

“ There is hope yet,” said the surgeon; “he can speak.” 

“Yes,” said Eugene, “Delphine is coming, and will be 
here shortly.” 

“Oh! that is nothing!” said Bianchon; “he has been 
talking about his daughters all the time. He calls for them 
as a man impaled calls for water, they say ” 

“We may as well give up,” said the physician, addressing 
the surgeon. “ Nothing more can be done now; the case is 
hopeless.” 

Bianchon and the house surgeon stretched the dying man 
out again on his loathsome bed. 

“ But the sheets ought to be changed,” added the physician. 
“Even if there is no hope left, something is due to human 
nature. I shall come back again, Bianchon,” he said, turn- 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


293 


ing to the medical student. “ If he complains again, rub some 
laudanum over the diaphragm.” 

He went, and the house surgeon went with him. 

“ Come, Eugene, pluck up heart, my boy,” said Bianchon, 
as soon as they were alone ; “ we must set about changing 
his sheets, and put him into a clean shirt. Go and tell Sylvie 

to bring up some sheets and come and help us to make the 
bed.” 

Eugene went downstairs, and found Mme.Vauquer engaged 
in setting the table ; Sylvie was helping her. Eugene had 
scarcely opened his mouth before the widow walked up to 
him with the acidulous sweet smile of a cautious shopkeeper 
who is anxious neither to lose money nor to offend a customer. 

“ My dear Monsieur Eugene,” she said, when he had 
spoken, “ you know quite as well as I do that Father Goriot 
has not a brass farthing left. If you give out clean linen for 
a man who is going to just turn up his eyes, you are not likely 
to see your sheets again, for one is sure to be wanted to wrap 
him in. Now, you owe me a hundred and forty-four francs 
as it is, add forty francs to that for the pair of sheets, and 
then there are several little things, besides the candle that 
Sylvie will give you ; altogether, it will all mount up to at least 
two hundred francs, which is more than a poor widow like 
me can afford to lose. Lord ! now, Monsieur Eugene, look 
at it fairly. I have lost quite enough in these five days since 
this run of ill-luck set in for me. I would rather than ten 
crowns that the old gentleman had moved out as you said. 

It sets the other lodgers against the house. It would not 
take much to make me send him to the workhouse. In short, 
just put yourself in my place. I have to think of my estab- 
lishment first, for I have my own living to make.” 

Eugene hurried up to Goriot’s room. 

“ Bianchon,” he cried, “ the money or the watch ? ” 
“There it is on the table, or the three hundred and sixty- 
odd francs that are left of it. I paid up all the old scores out 


294 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


of it before they let me have the things. The pawn ticket 
lies there under the money.” 

Rastignac hurried downstairs. 

“Here, madame,” he said in disgust, “let us square ac- 
counts. M. Goriot will not stay much longer in your house, 
nor shall I ” 

“ Yes, he will go out feet foremost, poor old gentleman,” 
she said, counting the francs with a half-facetious, half-lugu- 
brious expression. 

“ Let us get this over,” said Rastignac. 

“ Sylvie, look out some sheets, and go upstairs to help the 
gentlemen.” 

“ You won’t forget Sylvie,” said Mme. Vauquer speaking 
in Eugene’s ear ; “ she has been sitting up these two nights.” 

As soon as Eugene’s back was turned, the old woman hurried 
after her handmaid. 

“ Take the sheets that have had the sides turned into the 
middle, number 7. Lord ! they are plenty good enough for 
a corpse,” she said in Sylvie’s ear. 

Eugdne, by this time, was part of the way upstairs, and did 
not overhear the elderly economist. 

“Quick,” said Bianchon, “let us change his shirt. Hold 
him upright.” 

Eugene went to the head of the bed and supported the 
dying man, while Bianchon drew off his shirt ; and then 
Goriot made a movement as if he tried to clutch something 
to his breast, uttering a low inarticulate moaning the while, 
like some dumb animal in mortal pain. 

“Ah yes ! ” cried Bianchon. “It is the little locket and 
the chain made of hair that he wants ; we took it off a while 
ago when we put the blisters on him ! Poor fellow ! he must 
have it again. There it lies on the chimney-piece.” 

Eugene went to the chimney-piece and found a little plait 
of faded golden hair — Mme. Goriot’s hair, no doubt. He 
read the name on the little round locket, Anastasie on the 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


295 


one side, Delphine on the other. It was the symbol of his 
own heart that the father always wore on his breast. The 
curls of hair inside the locket were so fine and soft that it 
was plain they had been taken from two childish heads. When 
the old man felt the locket once more, his chest heaved with 
a long deep sigh of satisfaction, like a groan. It was some- 
thing terrible to see, for it seemed as if the last quiver of the 
nerves were laid bare to their eyes, the last communication 
of sense to the mysterious point within whence our sympathies 
come and whither they go. A delirious joy lighted up the 
distorted face. The terrific and vivid force of the feeling 
that had survived the power of thought made such an im- 
pression on the students that the dying man felt their hot 
tears falling on him, and gave a shrill cry of delight. 

“ Nasie ! Fifine ! ” 

“ There is life in him yet,” said Bianchon. 

“What does he go on living for?” said Sylvie. 

“ To suffer,” answered Rastignac. 

Bianchon made a sign to his friend to follow his example, 
knelt down and passed his arms under the sick man, and Ras- 
tignac on the other side did the same, so that Sylvie, standing 
in readiness, might draw the sheet from beneath and replace 
it with the one that she had brought. Those tears, no doubt, 
had misled Goriot ; for he gathered up all his remaining 
strength in a last effort, stretched out his hands, groped for the 
students’ heads, and as his fingers caught convulsively at their 
hair, they heard a faint whisper — 

“ Ah ! my angels ! ” 

Two words, two inarticulate murmurs, shaped into words 
by the soul which fled forth with them as they left his lips. 

“Poor dear! ” cried Sylvie, melted by that exclamation; 
the expression of the great love raised for the last time to a 
sublime height by that most ghastly and involuntary of lies. 

The father’s last breath must have been a sigh of joy, and 
in that sigh his whole life was summed up ; he was cheated 


296 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


even at the last. They laid Father Goriot upon his wretched 
bed with reverent hands. Thenceforward there was no ex- 
pression on his face, only the painful traces of the struggle 
between life and death that was going on in the machine ; for 
that kind of cerebral consciousness that distinguishes between 
pleasure and pain in a human being was extinguished ; it was 
only a question of time — and the mechanism itself would be 
destroyed. 

“ He will lie like this for several hours, and die so quietly 
at last that we shall not know when he goes ; there will be 
no rattle in the throat. The brain must be completely suf- 
fused.” 

As he spoke there was a footstep on the staircase, and a 
young woman hastened up, panting for breath. 

“She has come too late,” said Rastignac. 

But it was not Delphine ; it was Therese, her waiting- 
woman, who stood in the doorway. 

“Monsieur Eugene,” she said, “Monsieur and Madame 
have had a terrible scene about some money that Madame 
(poor thing !) wanted for her father. She fainted, and the 
doctor came, and she had to be bled, calling out all the while, 
1 My father is dying ; I want to see papa ! ’ It was heart- 
breaking to hear her ” 

“That will do, Therese. If she came now, it would be 
trouble thrown away. M. Goriot cannot recognize any one 
now.” 

“Poor, dear gentleman, is he as bad as all that?” said 
Therese. 

“You don’t want me now, I must go and look after my 
dinner; it is half-past four,” remarked Sylvie. The next 
instant she all but collided with Mme. de Restaud on the 
landing outside. 

There was something awful and appalling in the sudden 
apparition of the Countess. She saw the bed of death by the 
dim light of the single candle, and her tears flowed at the 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


297 


sight of her father’s passive features, from which the life had 
almost ebbed. Bianchon with thoughtful tact then left the 
room. 

“ I could not escape soon enough,” she said to Rastignac. 

The student bowed sadly in reply. Mme. de Restaud took 
her father’s hand and kissed it. 

“ Forgive me, father! You used to say that my voice 
would call you back from the grave ; ah ! come back for one 
moment to bless your penitent daughter. Do you hear me? 
Oh ! this is fearful ! No one on earth will ever bless me hence- 
forth ; every one hates me ; no one loves me but you in all 
the world. My own children will hate me. Take me with 
you, father ; I will love you, I will take care of you. He 
does not hear me I am mad ” 

She fell on her knees, and gazed wildly at the human wreck 
before her. 

“ My cup of misery is full,” she said, turning her eyes upon 
Eugene. “ M. de Trailles has fled, leaving enormous debts 
behind him, and I have found out that he was deceiving me. 
My husband will never forgive me, and I have left my 
fortune in his hands. I have lost all my illusions. Alas ! 
I have forsaken the one heart that loved me (she pointed 
to her father as she spoke), and for whom ? I have held 
his kindness cheap, and slighted his affection ; many and 
many a time I have given him pain, ungrateful wretch that 
I am ! ” 

“ He knew it,” said Rastignac. 

Just then Goriot’s eyelids unclosed ; it was only a muscular 
contraction, but the Countess’ sudden start of reviving hope 
was no less dreadful than the dying eyes. 

“Is it possible that he can hear me?” cried the Countess. 
“ No,” she answered herself, and sat down beside the bed. 
As Mme. de Restaud seemed to wish to sit by her father, 
Eugene went down to take a little food. The boarders were 
already assembled. 


298 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


“ Well,” remarked the painter, as he joined them, “it 
seems that there is to be a death-orama upstairs.” 

“Charles, I think you might find something less painful 
to joke about,” said Eugene. 

“So we may not laugh here,” returned the painter. 
“What harm does it do? Bianchon said that the old man 
was quite insensible.” 

“Well, then,” said the employ^ from the Museum, “he 
will die as he has lived.” 

“ My father is dead ! ” shrieked the Countess. 

The terrible cry brought Sylvie, Rastignac, and Bianchon ; 
Mine, de Restaud had fainted away. When she recovered 
they carried her downstairs, and put her into the cab that 
stood waiting at the door. Eugene sent Therese with her, 
and bade the maid take the Countess to Mme. de Nucingen. 

Bianchon came down to them. 

“Yes, he is dead,” he said. 

“ Come, sit down to dinner, gentlemen,” said Mme. Vau- 
quer, “or the soup will be cold.” 

The two students sat down together. 

“What is the next thing to be done?” Eugene asked of 
Bianchon. 

“I have closed his eyes and composed his limbs,” said 
Bianchon. “ When the certificate has been officially regis- 
tered at the mayor’s office, we will sew him in his winding- 
sheet and bury him somewhere. What do you think we ought 
to do ? ” 

“ He will not smell at his bread like this any more,” said 
the painter, mimicking the old man’s little trick. 

“Oh, hang it all!” cried the tutor, “let Father Goriot 
drop, and let us have something else for a change. He is a 
standing dish, and we have had him with every sauce this 
hour or more. It is one of the privileges of the good city of 
Paris that anybody may be born, or live, or die there without 
attracting any attention whatsoever. Let us profit by the 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


299 


advantages of civilization. There are fifty or sixty deaths 
every day ; if you have a mind to do it, you can sit down 
at any time and wail over whole hecatombs of dead in Paris. 
Father Goriot has gone off the hooks, has he ? So much the 
better for him. If you venerate his memory, keep it to your- 
selves, and let the rest of us feed in peace.” 

“ Oh, to be sure,” said the widow, “ it is all the better for 
him that he is dead. It looks as though he had had trouble 
enough, poor soul, while he was alive.” 

And this was all the funeral oration delivered over him 
who had been for Eugene the type and embodiment of fath- 
erhood. 

The fifteen lodgers began to talk as usual. When Bianchon 
and Eugene had satisfied their hunger, the rattle of spoons 
and forks, the boisterous conversation, the expressions on the 
faces that bespoke various degrees of want of feeling, glut- 
tony, or indifference, everything about them made them shiver 
with loathing. They went out to find a priest to watch that 
night with the dead. It was necessary to measure their last 
pious cares by the scanty sum of money that remained. Be- 
fore nine o’clock that evening the body was laid out on the 
bare sacking of the bedstead in the desolate room ; a lighted 
candle stood on either side, and the priest watched at the foot. 
Rastignac made inquiries of this latter as to the expenses of 
the funeral, and wrote to the Baron de Nucingen and the 
Comte de Restaud, entreating both gentlemen to authorize 
their man of business to defray the charges of laying their 
father-in-law in the grave. He sent Christophe with the 
letters; then he went to bed, tired out, and slept. 

Next day Bianchon and Rastignac were obliged to take the 
certificate to the registrar themselves, and by twelve o’clock 
the formalities were completed. Two hours went by ; no 
word came from the Count nor from the Baron ; nobody ap- 
peared to act for them, and Rastignac had already been 
obliged to pay the priest. Sylvie asked ten francs for sewing 


300 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


the old man in his winding-sheet and making him ready for 
the grave, and Eugene and Bianchon calculated that they had 
scarcely sufficient to pay for the funeral, if nothing was forth- 
coming from the dead man’s family. So it was the medical 
student who laid him in a pauper’s coffin, despatched from 
Bianchon’s hospital, whence he obtained it at a cheaper rate. 

“ Let us play those wretches a trick,” said he. “ Go to 
the cemetery, buy a grave for five years at Pere-Lachaise, and 
arrange with the church and the undertaker to have a third- 
class funeral. If the daughters and their husbands decline to 
repay you, you can carve this on the headstone — i Here lies 
M. Goriot , father of the Comtesse de Restaud and the Baronne 
de Nucingen, interred at the expense of two students. ’ 

Eugene took part of his friend’s advice, but only after he 
had gone in person first to M. and Mine, de Nucingen and 
then to M. and Mme. de Restaud — a fruitless errand. He 
went no farther than the doorstep in either house. The ser- 
vants had received strict orders to admit no one. 

“ Monsieur and madame can see no visitors. They have 
just lost their father, and are in deep grief over their loss.” 

Eugene’s Parisian experience told him that it was idle to 
press the point. Something clutched strangely at his heart 
when he saw that it was impossible to reach Delphine. 

“ Sell some of your ornaments,” he wrote hastily in the 
porter’s room, “so that your father may be decently laid in 
his last resting-place.” 

He sealed the note, and begged the porter to give it to 
Therese for her mistress ; but the man took it to the Baron de 
Nucingen, who flung the note into the fire. Eugene, having 
finished his errands, returned to the lodging-house about three 
o’clock. In spite of himself, the tears came into his eyes. 
The coffin, in its scanty covering of black cloth, was stand- 
ing there on the pavement before the gate, on two chairs. A 


FATHER GORIOT, 


301 


withered sprig of hyssop was soaking in the holy water bowl 
of silver-plated copper ; there was not a soul in the street, 
not a passer-by had stopped to sprinkle the coffin ; there was 
not even an attempt at a black drapery over the wicket. It 
was a pauper who lay there ; no one made a pretense of 
mourning for him ; he had neither friends nor kindred — there 
was no one to follow him to the grave. 

Bianchon’s duties compelled him to be at the hospital, but 
he had left a few lines for Eugene, telling his friend about the 
arrangements he had made for the burial service. The house 
student’s note told Rastignac that a mass was beyond their 
means, that the ordinary office for the dead was cheaper and 
must suffice, and that he had sent word to the undertaker by 
Christophe. Eugene had scarcely finished reading Bianchon’s 
scrawl, when he looked up and saw the little circular gold 
locket that contained the hair of Goriot’s two daughters in 
Mme. Vauquer’s hands. 

“ How dared you take it ? ” he asked. 

“Good Lord! is that to be buried along with him?” re- 
torted Sylvie, “It is gold.” 

“Of course it shall!” Eugene answered indignantly; 
“ he shall at any rate take one thing that may represent his 
daughters into the grave with him.” 

When the hearse came, Eugene had the coffin carried into 
the house again, unscrewed the lid, and reverently laid on the 
old man’s breast the token that recalled the days when 
Delphine and Anastasie were innocent little maidens, before 
they began “ to think for themselves,” as he had moaned out 
in his agony. 

Rastignac and Christophe and the two undertaker’s men 
were the only followers of the funeral. The Church of Saint- 
Etienne du Mont was only a little distance from the Rue 
Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve. When the coffin had been deposited 
in a low, dark, little chapel, the law student looked round in 
vain for Goriot’s two daughters or their husbands. Christophe 


302 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


was his only fellow-mourner ; Christophe, who appeared to 
think it was his duty to attend the funeral of the man who 
had put him in the way of such handsome tips. As they 
waited there in the chapel for the two priests, the chorister, 
and the beadle, Rastignac grasped Christophe’s hand. He 
could not utter a word just then. 

“Yes, Monsieur Eugene,” said Christophe, “he was a 
good and worthy man, who never said one word louder than 
another; he never did any one any harm, and gave nobody 
any trouble.” 

The two priests, the chorister, and the beadle came, and 
said and did as much as could be expected for seventy francs 
in an age when religion cannot afford to say prayers for nothing. 

The ecclesiastics chanted a psalm, the Libera nos and the 
De profundis. The whole service lasted about twenty minutes. 
There was but one mourning coach, which the priest and chor- 
ister agreed to share with Eugene and Christophe. 

“There is no one else to follow us,” remarked the priest, 
“ so we may as well go quickly, and so save time ; it is half- 
past five.” 

But just as the coffin was put in the hearse, two empty car- 
riages, with the armorial bearings of the Comte de Restaud 
and the Baron de Nucingen, arrived and followed in the pro- 
cession to Pere-Lachaise. At six o’clock Goriot’s coffin was 
lowered into the grave, his daughters’ servants standing round 
the while. The ecclesiastic recited the short prayer that the 
students could afford to pay for, and then both priests and 
lackeys disappeared at once. The two grave-diggers flung in 
several spadefuls of earth, and then stopped and asked Ras- 
tignac for their fee. Eugene felt in vain in his pocket, and 
was obliged to borrow five francs of Christophe. This thing, 
so trifling in itself, gave Rastignac a terrible pang of distress. 
It was growing dusk, the damp twilight fretted his nerves ; he 
gazed down into the grave, and the tears he shed were drawn 
from him by the sacred emotion, a single-hearted sorrow. 


FATHER GO RIOT. 


303 


When such tears fall on earth, their radiance reaches heaven. 
And with those tears that fell on Father Goriot’s grave, Eugene 
Rastignac’s youth ended. He folded his arms and gazed at 
the clouded sky ; and Christophe, after a glance at him, turned 
and went — Rastignac was left alone. 

He went a few paces farther, to the highest point of the 
cemetery, and looked out over Paris and the windings of the 
Seine ; the lamps were beginning to shine on either side of 
the river. His eyes turned almost eagerly to the space be- 
tween the column of the Place Vendome and the cupola of 
the Invalides ; there lay the shining world that he had wished 
to reach. He glanced over that humming hive, seeming to 
draw a foretaste of its honey, and said magniloquently — 

“ Henceforth there is war between us.” 

And by way of throwing down the glove to society, Ras- 
tignac went to dine with Mme. de Nucingen. 



e 








































































M. GOBSECK. 


To M. le Baron Barchou de Penhoen . 

Among all the pupils of the Oratorian school at Ven- 
dome, we are, I think , the only two who have after- 
wards met in mid-career of a life of letters — we who 
once were cultivating Philosophy when by rights we 
should have been minding our De viris. When we 
met , you were engaged upon your noble works on 
Ger??ian philosophy, and I upon this study. So ?ieither 
of us has missed his vocation ; and you , when you see 
your na?ne here , will feel , no doubt , as much pleasure 
as he who inscribes his work to you. Your old school- 
fellow, 

1840. De Balzac. 

It was one o’clock in the morning, during the winter of 
1829-30, but in the Vicomtesse de Grandlieu’s salon two 
persons stayed on who did not belong to her family circle. 
A young and good-looking man heard the clock strike, and 
took his leave. When the courtyard echoed with the sound 
of a departing carriage, the Vicomtesse looked up, saw that 
no one was present save her brother and a friend of the family 
finishing their game of piquet, and went across to her daugh- 
ter. The girl, standing by the chimney-piece, apparently 
examining a transparent fire-screen, was listening to the 
sounds from the courtyard in a way that justified certain 
maternal fears. 

“ Camille,” said the Vicomtesse, “if you continue to 
behave to young Comte de Restaud as you have done this 
evening, you will oblige me to see no more of him here. 
Listen, child, and if you have any confidence in my love, let 
20 ( < 305 ) 


306 


M. GOBSECK. 


me guide you in life. At seventeen one cannot judge of 
past or future, nor of certain social considerations. I have 
only one thing to say to you. M. de Restaud has a mother, 
a mother who would waste millions of francs ; a woman of 
no birth, a Mile. Goriot ; people talked a good deal about 
her at one time. She behaved so badly to her own father, 
that she certainly does not deserve to have so good a son. 
The young Count adores her, and maintains her in her posi- 
tion with dutifulness worthy of all praise, and he is extremely 
good to his brother and sister. But however admirable his 
behavior may be,” the Vicomtesse added with a shrewd ex- 
pression, “so long as his mother lives, any family would take 
alarm at the idea of intrusting a daughter’s fortune and future 
to young Restaud.” 

“ I overheard a word now and again in your talk with Mile, 
de Grandlieu,” cried the friend of the family, “and it made 
me anxious to put in a word of my own. I have won, M. le 
Comte,” he added, turning to his opponent. “I shall throw 
you over and go to your niece’s assistance.” 

“ See what it is to have an attorney’s ears ! ” exclaimed the 
Vicomtesse. “ My dear Derville, how could you know what 
I was saying to Camille in a whisper?” 

“I knew it from your looks,” answered Derville, seating 
himself in a low chair by the fire. 

Camille’s uncle went to her side, and Mme. de Grandlieu 
took up her position on a hearth stool between her daughter 
and Derville. 

“The time has come for telling a story, which should 
modify your judgment as to Ernest de Restaud’s prospects.” 

“ A story ! ” cried Camille. “ Do begin at once, monsieur.” 

The glance that Derville gave the Vicomtesse told her that 
this tale was meant for her. The Vicomtesse de Grandlieu, 
be it said, was one of the greatest ladies in the Faubourg 
Saint-Germain, by reason of her fortune and her ancient 
name; and though it may seem improbable that a Paris 


M. GOBSECK. 


307 


attorney should speak so familiarly to her, or be so much at 
home in her house, the fact is nevertheless easily explained. 

When Mme. de Grandlieu returned to France with the royal 
family, she came to Paris, and at first lived entirely on the 
pension allowed her out of the civil list by Louis XVIII. — 
an intolerable position. The Hotel de Grandlieu had been 
sold by the Republic. It came to Derville’s knowledge that 
there were flaws in the title, and he thought that it ought to 
return to the Vicomtesse. He instituted proceedings for 
nullity of contract, and gained the day. Encouraged by 
this success, he used legal quibbles to such purpose that he 
compelled some institution or other to disgorge the forest of 
Liceney. Then he won certain lawsuits against the Canal 
d’ Orleans, and recovered a tolerably large amount of property, 
with which the Emperor had endowed various public institu- -> 
tions. So it fell out that, thanks to the young attorney’s 
skillful management, Mme. de Grandlieu’s income reached 
the sum of some sixty thousand francs, to say nothing of the 
vast sums returned to her by the law of indemnity. And 
Derville, a man of high character, well-informed, modest, and 
pleasant in company, became the house-friend of the family. 

By his conduct of Mme. de Grandlieu’s affairs he had fairly 
earned the esteem of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and num- 
bered the best families among his clients ; but he did not take 
advantage of his popularity, as an ambitious man might have 
done. The Vicomtesse would have had him sell his practice 
and enter the magistracy, in which career advancement would 
have been swift and certain with such influence at his dis- 
posal ; but he persistently refused all offers. He only went 
into society to keep up his connections, but he occasionally 
spent an evening at the Hotel de Grandlieu. It was a very 
lucky thing for him that his talents had been brought into the 
light by his devotion to Mme. de Grandlieu, for his practice 
otherwise might have gone to pieces. Derville had not an 
attorney's soul. Since Ernest de Restaud had appeared at 


308 


M. GOBSECK. 


the Hotel de Grandlieu, and he had noticed that Camille felt 
attracted to the young man, Derville had been as assiduous in 
his visits as any dandy of the Chaussee-d’ Antin newly ad- 
mitted to the noble Faubourg. At a ball only a few days 
before, when he happened to stand near Camille, and said, 
indicating the Count— 

“It is a pity that yonder youngster has not two or three 
million francs, is it not?” 

“Is it a pity? I do not think so,” the girl answered. 
“ M. de Restaud has plenty of ability ; he is well educated, 
and the minister, his chief, thinks well of him. He will be 
a remarkable man, I have no doubt. ‘ Yonder youngster ’ 
will have as much money as he wishes when he comes into 
power. ’ ’ 

“ Yes, but suppose that he were rich already ? ” 

“ Rich already ? ” repeated Camille, flushing red. “ Why, 
all the girls in the room would be quarreling for him,” she 
added, glancing at the quadrilles. 

“And then,” retorted the attorney, “Mile, de Grandlieu 
might not be the one towards whom his eyes are always 
turned ? That is what that red color means ! You like him, 
do you not? Come, speak out.” 

Camille suddenly rose to go. 

“She loves him,” Derville thought. 

Since that evening, Camille had been unwontedly attentive 
to the attorney, who approved of her liking for Ernest de 
Restaud. Hitherto, although she knew well that her family 
lay under great obligations to Derville, she had felt respect 
rather than real friendship for him, their relation was more a 
matter of politeness than of warmth of feeling; and by her 
manner, and by the tones of her voice, she had always made 
him sensible of the distance which socially lay between them. 
Gratitude is a charge upon the inheritance which the second 
generation is apt to repudiate. 

“This adventure,” Derville began after a pause, “brings 


M. GOBSECK. 


309 


the one romantic event in my life to my mind. You are 
laughing already,” he went on; “ it seems so ridiculous, 
doesn’t it, that an attorney should speak of a romance in his 
life ? But once I was five-and-twenty, like everybody else, 
and even then I had seen some queer things. I ought to be- 
gin at the beginning by telling you about some one whom it 
is impossible that you should have known. The man in ques- 
tion was a usurer. 

“ Can you grasp a clear notion of that sallow, wan face of 
his ? I wish the Academie would give me leave to dub such 
faces the lunar type. It was like silver-gilt, with the gilt 
rubbed off. His hair was iron-gray, sleek, and carefully 
combed; his features might have been cast in bronze; Tal- 
leyrand himself was not more impassive than this money- 
lender. A pair of little eyes, yellow as a ferret’s, and with 
scarce an eyelash to them, peered out from under the shelter- 
ing peak of a shabby old cap, as if they feared the light. 
He had the thin lips that you see in Rembrandt’s or Metsu’s 
portraits of alchemists and shrunken old men, and a nose so 
sharp at the tip that it put you in mind of a gimlet. His voice 
was low; he always spoke suavely; he never flew into a pas- 
sion. His age was a problem ; it was hard to say whether he 
had grown old before his time, or whether by economy of 
youth he had saved enough to last him his life. 

“This room, and everything in it, from the green baize of 
his bureau to the strip of carpet by the bed, was as clean and 
threadbare as the chilly sanctuary of some elderly spinster who 
spends her days in rubbing her furniture. In winter-time, 
the live brands of the fire smoldered all day in a bank of 
ashes ; there was never any flame in his grate. He went 
through his day, from his uprising to his evening coughing- 
fit, with the regularity of a pendulum, and in some sort was 
a clockwork man, wound up by a night’s slumber. Touch a 
wood-louse on an excursion across your sheet of paper, and 
the creature shams death ; and in something the same way my 


310 


M. GOBSECK. 


acquaintance would stop short in the middle of a sentence, 
while a cart went by, to save the strain to his voice. Follow- 
ing the example of Fontanelle, he was thrifty of pulse-strokes, 
and concentrated all human sensibility in the innermost sanc- 
tuary of self. 

“ His life flowed soundless as the sands of an hour-glass. His 
victims sometimes flew into a rage and made a great deal of 
noise, followed by a great silence ; so is it in a kitchen after 
a fowl’s neck has been wrung. 

“Towards evening this bill of exchange incarnate would 
assume ordinary human shape, and his metals were metamor- 
phosed into a human heart. When he was satisfied with his 
day’s business, he would rub his hands ; his inward glee would 
escape like smoke through every rift and wrinkle of his face. 
In no other way is it possible to give an idea of the mute play 
of muscle which expressed sensations similar to the soundless 
laughter of ‘Leather-Stocking.’ Indeed, even in transports 
of joy, his conversation was confined to monosyllables ; he 
wore the same non-committal countenance. 

“This was the neighbor chance found for me in the house 
in the Rue des Gres, where I used to live when as yet I was 
only a second clerk finishing my third year’s studies. The 
house is damp and dark, and boasts no courtyard. All the 
windows look on the street ; the whole dwelling, in claustral 
fashion, is divided into rooms or cells of equal size, all open- 
ing upon a long corridor dimly lit with borrowed lights. The 
place must have been part of an old convent once. So gloomy 
was it, that the gaiety of eldest sons forsook them on the stairs 
before they reached my neighbor’s door. He and his house 
were much alike ; even so does the oyster resemble his native 
rock. 

“I was the one creature with whom he had any communi- 
cation, socially speaking ; he would come in to ask for a light, 
to borrow a book or a newspaper, and of an evening he would 
allow me to go into his cell, and when he was in the humor 


M. GOBSECK. 


311 


wc would chat together. These marks of confidence were 
the results of four years of neighborhood and my own sober 
conduct. From sheer lack of pence, I was bound to live 
pretty much as he did. Had he any relations or friends ? 
Was he rich or poor? Nobody could give an answer to these 
questions. I myself never saw money in his room. Doubt- 
less his capital was safely stowed in the strong rooms of the 
bank. He used to collect his bills himself as they fell due, 
running all over Paris on a pair of shanks as skinny as a stag’s. 
On occasion he could be a martyr to prudence. One day, 
when he happened to have gold in his pockets, a double napo- 
leon worked its way somehow or other out of his fob and fell, 
and another lodger following him up the stairs picked up the 
coin and returned it to its owner. 

“‘That isn’t mine !’ said he with a start of surprise. 

‘ Mine, indeed ! If I were rich, should I live as I do ! ’ 

“ He made his cup of coffee himself every morning on the 
cast-iron chafing dish which stood all day in the black angle 
of the grate ; his dinner came in from a cookshop ; and our 
old porter’s wife went up at the prescribed hour to set his 
room in order. Finally, a whimsical chance, in which Sterne 
would have seen predestination, had named the man Gobseck. 
When I did business for him later, I came to know that he 
was about seventy-six years old at the time when we became 
acquainted. He was born about 1740, in some outlying 
suburb of Antwerp, of a Dutch father and a Jewish mother, 
and his name was Jean-Esther Van Gobseck. You remember 
how all Paris took an interest in that murder case, a woman 
named ‘ The Holland Belle ? ’ I happened to mention it 
to my old neighbor, and he answered without the slightest 
symptom of interest or surprise, ‘She is my grandniece.’ 

“That was the only remark drawn from him by the death 
of his sole surviving next of kin, his sister’s grand-daughter. 
From reports of the case I found that * The Holland Belle ’ 
was in fact named Sara Van Gobseck. When I asked by 

L 


312 


M. GOBSECK. 


what curious chance his grandniece came to bear his surname, 
he smiled — 

“ ‘ The women never marry in our family.’ 

11 Singular creature, he had never cared to find out a single 
relative among four generations counted on the female side. 
The thought of his heirs was abhorrent to him ; and the idea 
that his wealth could pass into other hands after his death 
simply inconceivable. 

“ He was a child, ten years old, when his mother shipped 
him off as cabin-boy on a voyage to the Dutch Straits settle- 
ments, and there he knocked about for twenty years. The 
inscrutable lines on that sallow forehead kept the secret of 
horrible adventures, sudden panic, unhoped-for luck, romantic 
cross events, joys that knew no limit, hunger endured and 
love trampled underfoot, fortunes risked, lost, and recovered, 
life endangered time and time again, and saved, it may be, 
by one of the rapid, ruthless decisions absolved by necessity. 
He had known Admiral Simeuse, M. de Tally, M. de Ker- 
garouet, M. d’Estaing, (Le Bailli de Suffren,)M. de Porten- 
duere, Lord Cornwallis, Lord Hastings, Tippoo Sahib’s father, 
Tippoo Sahib himself. The bully who served Mahadaji Sind- 
hia, King of Delhi, and did so much to found the power 
of the Mahrattas, had had dealings with M. Gobseck. Long 
residence at St. Thomas brought him in contact with Victor 
Hughes and other notorious pirates. In his quest of fortune 
he had left no stone unturned ; witness an attempt to discover 
the treasure of that tribe of savages so famous in Buenos 
Ayres and its neighborhood. He had a personal knowledge 
of the events of the American War of Independence. But if 
he spoke of the Indies or of America, as he did very rarely with 
me, and never with any one else, he seemed to regard it as an 
indiscretion and to repent of it afterwards. If humanity and 
sociability are in some sort a religion, M. Gobseck might be 
ranked as an infidel ; but though I set myself to study him, I 
must confess, to my shame, that his real nature was impenetrable 


M. GOBSECIC 


313 


lip to the very last. I even felt doubts at times as to his sex. 
If all usurers are like this one, I maintain that they belong to 
the neuter gender. 

“ Did he adhere to his mother’s religion? Did he look on 
Gentiles as his legitimate prey? Had he turned Roman 
Catholic, Lutheran, Mahometan, Brahmin, or what not? I 
never knew anything whatsoever about his religious opinions, 
and so far as I could see, he was indifferent rather than 
incredulous. 

“One evening I went in to see this man who had turned 
himself to gold ; the usurer, whom his victims (his clients, as 
he styled them) were wont to call Daddy Gobseck, perhaps 
ironically, perhaps by way of antiphrasis. He was sitting in 
his armchair, motionless as a statue, staring fixedly at the 
mantle-shelf, where he seemed to read the figures of his state- 
ments. A lamp, with a pedestal that had once been green, 
was burning in the room ; but so far from taking color from 
its smoky light, his face seemed to stand out positively paler 
against the background. He pointed to a chair set for me, 
but not a word did he say. 

“ ‘ What thoughts can this being have in his mind?’ said 
I to myself. ‘ Does he know that a God exists ; does he 
know there are such things as feeling, woman, happiness? ’ I 
pitied him as I might have pitied a diseased creature. But, at 
the same time, I knew quite well that while he had millions 
of francs at his command, he possessed the world no less in 
idea — that world which he had explored, ransacked, weighed, 
appraised, and exploited. 

“ ‘ Good-day, Daddy Gobseck,’ I began, as I quietly took 
the seat pointed out to me. 

“ He turned his face towards me, with a slight contraction 
of his bushy, black eyebrows ; this characteristic shade of ex- 
pression in him meant as much as the most jubilant smile on 
a southern face. 

“ £ You look just as gloomy as you did that day when the 


314 


M GOBSECK. 


news came of the failure of that bookseller whose sharpness # 
you admired so much, though you were one of his victims.’^ 

“‘One of his victims?’ he repeated, with a look of 
astonishment. 

“ ‘ Yes. Did you not refuse to accept composition at the 
meeting of creditors until he undertook privately to pay you 
your debt in full ; and did he not give you bills accepted by 
the insolvent firm ; and then, when he set up in business 
again, did he not pay you the dividend upon those bills of 
yours, signed as they were by the bankrupt firm ? ’ 

“ ‘ He was a sharp one, but I had it out of him.’ 

“‘Then have you some bills to protest? To-day is the 
30th, I believe.’ 

“It was the first time that I had spoken to him of money. 
He looked ironically up at me ; then in those bland accents, 
not unlike the husky tones which the tyro draws from a flute, 
he answered, ‘ I am amusing myself.’ 

“ ‘ So you amuse yourself now and again ? ’ 

“ ‘ Do you imagine that the only poets in the world are 
those who print their verses? ’ he asked, with a pitying look 
and shrug of the shoulders. 

“ ‘ Poetry in that head 1 ’ thought I, for as yet I knew 
nothing of his life. 

“ ‘What life could be as glorious as mine?’ he continued, 
and his eyes lighted up. ‘You are young, your mental 
visions are colored by youthful blood, you see women’s faces 
in the fire, while I see nothing but coals in mine. You have 
all sorts of beliefs, while I have no beliefs at all. Keep your 
illusions — if you can. Now I will show you life with the 
discount taken off. Go wherever you like, or stay at home 
by the fireside with your wife, there always comes a time when 
you settle down in a certain groove, the groove of your pref- 
erence ; and then happiness consists in the exercise of your 
faculties by applying them to realities. Anything more in 
the way of precept is false. My principles have been various, 


M. GO BSE CAT. 


315 


among various men ; I had to change them with every change 
of latitude. Things that we admire in Europe are punishable 
*n Asia, and a vice in Paris becomes a necessity when you 
have passed the Azores. There are no such things as hard- 
and-fast rules ; there are only conventions adapted to the 
climate. Fling a man headlong into one social melting-pot 
after another, and convictions and forms and moral systems 
become so many meaningless words to him. The one thing 
that always remains, the one sure instinct that nature has im- 
planted in us, is the instinct of self-preservation. In European 
society you call this instinct self-interest. If you had lived as 
long as I have, you would know that there is but one concrete 
reality invariable enough to be worth caring about, and that 
is — Gold. Gold represents every form of human power. I 
have traveled. I found out that there were either hills or 
plains everywhere: the plains are monotonous, the hills a 
weariness ; consequently, place may be left out of the question. 
As to manners ; man is man all the world over. The same 
battle between the poor and the rich is going on everywhere ; 
it is inevitable everywhere ; consequently, it is better to 
exploit than to be exploited. Everywhere you find the man 
of thews and sinews who toils, and the lymphatic man who 
torments himself ; and pleasures are everywhere the same, for 
when all sensations are exhausted, all that survives is vanity 
— vanity is the abiding substance of us, the / in us. Vanity 
is only to be satisfied by gold in floods. Our dreams need 
time and physical means and painstaking thought before they 
can be realized. Well, gold contains all things in embryo; 
gold realizes all things for us. 

“ ‘ None but fools and invalids can find pleasure in shuffling 
cards all evening long to find out whether they shall win a 
few pence at the end. None but driveling idiots could spend 
time in inquiring into all that is happening around them, 
whether Madame Such-an-One slept single on her couch or in 
company, whether she has more blood than lymph, more tern- 


316 


M. GOBSECK. 


perament than virtue. None but the dupes, who fondly 
imagine that they are useful to their like, can interest them- 
selves in laying down rules for political guidance amid events 
which neither they nor any one else foresee, nor ever will 
foresee. None but simpletons can delight in talking about 
stage players and repeating their sayings ; making the daily 
promenade of a caged animal over a rather larger area; 
dressing for others, eating for others, priding themselves on a 
horse or a carriage such as no neighbor can have until three 
days later. What is all this but Parisian life summed up in a 
few phrases? Let us find a higher outlook on life than theirs. 
Happiness consists either in strong emotions which drain our 
vitality, or in methodical occupation which makes existence 
like a bit of English machinery, working with the regularity 
of clockwork. A higher happiness than either consists in a 
curiosity, styled noble, a wish to learn nature’s secrets, or to 
attempt by artificial means to imitate nature to some extent. 
What is this in two words but science and art, or passion or 
calm? Ah! well, every human passion wrought up to its 
highest pitch in the struggle for existence comes to parade 
itself here before me — as I live in calm. As for your scientific 
curiosity, a kind of wrestling bout in which man is never 
uppermost, I replace it by an insight into all the springs of 
action in man and woman. To sum up, the world is mine 
without effort of mine, and the world has not the slightest 
hold on me. Listen to this,* he went on, ‘ I will tell you the 
history of my morning, and you will divine my pleasures.’ 

“ He got up, pushed the bolt of the door, drew a tapestry 
curtain across it with a sharp grating sound of the rings on 
the rod, then he sat down again. 

“ ‘ This morning,’ he said, ‘ I had only two amounts to col- 
lect ; the rest of the bills that were due I gave away instead 
of cash to my customers yesterday. So much saved, you see, 
for when I discount a bill I always deduct two francs for a 
hired brougham — expenses of collection. A pretty thing it 


M. GOBSECK. 


317 


would be, would it not, if my clients were to set me trudging 
all over Paris for a half-a-dozen francs of discount, when no 
man is my master, and I only pay seven francs in the shape 
of taxes? 

“ ‘ The first bill for a thousand francs was presented by a 
young fellow, a smart buck with a spangled waistcoat, and an 
eyeglass, and a tilbury and an English horse, and all the rest 
of it. The bill bore the signature of one of the prettiest 
women in Paris, married to a count, a great landowner. 
Now, how came that countess to put her name to a bill of 
exchange, legally not worth the paper it was written upon, 
but practically very good business ; for these women, poor 
things, are afraid of the scandal that a protested bill makes in 
a family, and would give themselves away in payment sooner 
than fail ? I wanted to find out what that bill of exchange 
really represented. Was it stupidity, imprudence, love, or 
charity ? 

“ ‘ The second bill, bearing the signature “ Fanny Mal- 
vaut,” came to me from a linen-draper on the high way to 
bankruptcy. Now, no creature who has any credit with a bank 
comes to me. The first step to my door means that a man is 
desperately hard up ; that the news of his failure will soon 
come out ; and, most of all, it means that he has been every- 
where else first. The stag is always at bay when I see him, 
and a pack of creditors are hard upon his track. The 
Countess lived in the Rue du Helder, and my Fanny in the 
Rue Montmartre. How many conjectures I made as I set out 
this morning ! If these two women were not able to pay, 
they would show me more respect than they would show their 
own fathers. What tricks and grimaces would not the 
Countess try for a thousand francs ! She would be so nice to 
me, she would talk to me in that ingratiating tone peculiar to 
endorsers of bills, she would pour out a torrent of coaxing 

words, perhaps she would beg and pray, and I ’ (here the 

old man turned his pale eyes upon me ) — 4 and I not to be 


318 


M. GOBSECK. 


moved, inexorable ! ’ he continued. ‘ I am there as the 
avenger, the apparition of remorse. So much for hypotheses. 

I reached the house. 

“ ‘ “ Madame la Comtesse is asleep,” says the maid. 

“ ‘ “ When can I see her? ” 

“ ‘ “ At twelve o’clock.” 

“ * “Is Madame la Comtesse ill? ” 

“ * tf No, sir, but she only came home at three o’clock this 
morning from a ball.” 

“ ‘ “ My name is Gobseck, tell her that I shall call again at 
twelve o’clock,” and out I went, leaving traces of my muddy 
boots on the carpet which covered the paved staircase. I 
like to leave mud on a rich man’s carpet ; it is not petty spite ; 
I like to make them feel a touch of the ’claws of necessity. 
In the Rue Montmartre I thrust open the old gateway of a 
poor-looking house, and looked into a dark courtyard where 
the sunlight never shines. The porter’s lodge was grimy, the 
window looked like the sleeve of some shabby wadded gown 
— greasy, dirty, and full of holes. 

“ ‘ “ Mile. Fanny Malvaut ? ” 

“ ‘ “ She has gone out ; but if you have come about a bill, 
the money is waiting for you.” 

“ * “ I will look in again,” said I. 

“ ‘ As soon as I knew that the porter had the money for me, 
I wanted to know what the girl was like ; I pictured her as 
pretty. The rest of the morning I spent in looking at the 
prints in the shop windows along the boulevard ; then, just as 
it struck twelve, I went through the Countess’ ante-chamber. 

“ 1 “ Madame has just this minute rung for me,” said the 
maid ; “ I don’t think she can see you yet.” 

“ ‘ “ I will wait,” said I, and sat down in an easy-chair. 

“ ‘ Venetian shutters were opened, and presently the maid 
came hurrying back. 

“ 1 “ Come in, sir.” 

“ ‘ From the sweet tone of the girl’s voice, I knew that 


M. GOBSECK. 


319 


the mistress could not be ready to pay. What a handsome 
woman it was that I saw in another moment ! She had 
flung an India shawl hastily over her bare shoulders, cov- 
ering herself with it completely, while it revealed the bare 
outlines of the form beneath. She wore a loose gown 
trimmed with snowy ruffles, which told plainly that her 
laundress’ bills amounted to something like two thousand 
francs in the course of a year. Her dark curls escaped from 
beneath a bright India handkerchief, knotted carelessly about 
her head after the fashion of Creole women. The bed lay 
in disorder that told of broken slumber. A painter would 
have paid money to stay a while to see the scene that I 
saw. Under the luxurious hanging draperies, the pillow, 
crushed into the depths of an eider-down quilt, its lace 
border standing out in contrast against the background of 
blue silk, bore a vague impress that kindled the imagina- 
tion. A pair of satin slippers gleamed from the great bear- 
skin rug spread by the carved mahogany lions at the bed- 
foot, where she had flung them off in her weariness after the 
ball. A crumpled gown hung over a chair, the sleeves touch- 
ing the floor; stockings which a breath would have blown 
away were twisted about the leg of an easy-chair ; white ribbon 
garters straggled over a settee. A fan of price, half unfolded, 
glittered on the chimney-piece. Drawers stood open ; flowers, 
diamonds, gloves, a bouquet, a girdle, were littered about. 
The room was full of vague sweet perfume. And — beneath 
all the luxury and disorder, beauty and incongruity — I saw 
misery crouching in wait for her or for her adorer, misery 
rearing its head, for the countess had begun to feel the edge 
of those fangs. Her tired face was an epitome of the room 
strewn with relics of a past festival. The scattered gew-gaws, 
pitiable this morning, when gathered together and coherent, 
had turned heads the night before. 

“ ‘ What efforts to drink of the Tantalus cup of bliss I 
could read in these traces of love stricken by the thunderbolt 


320 


M. GOBSECK. 


remorse — in this visible presentment of a life of luxury, 
extravagance, and riot. There were faint red marks on 
her young face, signs of the fineness of the skin ; but her 
features were coarsened, as it were, and the circles about her 
eyes were unwontedly dark. Nature nevertheless was so vig- 
orous in her, that these traces of past folly did not spoil her 
beauty. Her eyes glittered. She looked like some Herodias 
of da Vinci’s (I have dealt in pictures), so magnificently full 
of life and energy was she ; there was nothing starved nor 
stinted in feature or outline ; she awakened desire ; it seemed 
to me that there was some passion in her yet stronger than 
love. I was taken with her. It was a long while since my 
heart had throbbed ; so I was paid then and there — for I 
would give a thousand francs for a sensation that should bring 
me back memories of youth. 

“ * “ Monsieur,” she said, finding a chair for me, “ will you 
be so good as to wait ? ” 

“ ‘ “ Until this time to-morrow, madame,” I said, folding up 
the bill again. “ I cannot legally protest this bill any sooner.” 
And within myself I said — “ Pay the price of your luxury, pay 
for your name, pay for your ease, pay for the monopoly which 
you enjoy ! The rich have invented judges and courts of law 
to secure their goods, and the guillotine — that candle in which 
so many an ignorant moth burns his wings. But for you who 
lay in silk, under silken coverlets, there is remorse, and grind- 
ing of teeth beneath a smile, and those fantastical lions’ jaws 
are gaping to set their fangs in your heart.” 

“ ‘ “ Protest the bill 1 Can vou mean it ? ” she cried, with 
her eyes upon me ; “ could you have so little consideration 
for me?” 

“ ‘ “ If the King himself owed money to me, madame, and 
did not pay it, I should summons him even sooner than any 
other debtor.” 

“ ‘ While we were speaking, somebody tapped gently at the 
door. 


M. GOBSECK. 


321 


“ i “ I cannot see any one,” she cried imperiously. 

“ ‘ “But, Anastasie, I particularly wish to speak to you.” 

“ ‘ “ Not just now, dear,” she answered in a milder tone, but 
with no sign of relenting. 

“ ‘ “ What nonsense ! You are talking to some one,” said 
the voice, and in came a man who could only be the Count. 

“ ‘The countess gave me a glance. I saw how it was. She 
was thoroughly in my power. There was a time, when I was 
young, and might perhaps have been stupid enough not to 
protest the bill. At Pondicherry, in 1763, I let a woman off, 
and nicely she paid me out afterwards. I deserved it; what 
call was there for me to trust her ? ’ 

“ ‘ “ What does this gentleman want ?” asked the Count. 

“ ‘I could see that the Countess was trembling from head 
to foot ; the white satin skin of her throat was rough, “ turned 
to goose-flesh,” to use the familiar expression. As for me, I 
laughed in myself without moving a muscle. 

“ ( a This gentleman is one of my tradesmen,” she said. 

“ ‘The Count turned his back on me; I drew the bill half 
out of my pocket. After that inexorable movement, she 
came over to me and put a diamond into my hands. “ Take 
it,” she said, “ and be gone.” 

“‘We exchanged values, and I made my bow and went. 
The diamond was quite worth twelve hundred francs to me. 
Out in the courtyard I saw a swarm of flunkeys, brushing 
their liveries, waxing their boots, and cleaning sumptuous 
equipages. 

“ ‘ “This is what brings these people to me ! ” said I to 
myself. “ It is to keep up this kind of thing that they steal 
millions with all due formalities, and betray their country. 
The great lord, and the little man who apes the great lord, 
bathes in mud once for all to save himself a splash or two 
when he goes afoot through the streets.” 

“ ‘ Just then the great gates were opened to admit a cabriolet. 
It was the same young fellow who had brought the bill to me. 

21 


322 


M. GOBSECK. 


“ * “ Sir,” I said, as he alighted, “ here are two hundred 
francs, which I beg you to return to Mme. la Comtesse, and 
have the goodness to tell her that I hold the pledge which she 
deposited with me this morning at her disposition for a week.” 

“ ‘He took the two hundred francs, and an ironical smile 
stole over his face ; it was as if he had said, “ Aha ! so she 

has paid it, has she ? Faith, so much the better ! ” I 

read the Countess’ future in his face. That good-looking, 
fair-haired young gentleman is a heartless gambler ; he will 
ruin himself, ruin her, ruin her husband, ruin the children, 
eat up their portions, and work more havoc in Parisian salons 
than a whole battery of howitzers in a regiment. 

“ * I went back to see Mile. Fanny in the Rue Montmartre, 
climbed a very steep, narrow staircase, and reached a two- 
room apartment on the fifth floor. Everything was as neat 
as a new ducat. I did not see a speck of dust on the furni- 
ture in the first room, where Mile. Fanny was sitting. Mile. 
Fanny herself was a young Parisian girl, quietly dressed, with 
a delicate fresh face and a winning look. The arrangement 
of her neatly brushed chestnut hair in a double curve on her 
forehead lent a refined expression to blue eyes, clear as crys- 
tal. The broad daylight streaming in through the short cur- 
tains against the window-pane fell with softened light on her 
girlish face. A pile of shaped pieces of linen told me that 
she was a sempstress. She looked like the spirit of solitude. 
When I held out the bill, I remarked that she had not been 
at home when I called in the morning. 

“ 1 “ But the money was left with the porter’s wife,” said she. 

“ ‘I pretended not to understand. 

“ ‘ “ You go out early, mademoiselle, it seems.” 

<<<<<! ver y seldom leave my room ; but when you work all 
night, you are obliged to take a bath sometimes.” 

“ 4 I looked at her. A glance told me all about her life. 
Here was a girl condemned by misfortune to toil, a girl who 
came of honest farmer folk, for she had still a freckle or two 


M. GOBSECK. 


323 


that told of country birth. There was an indefinable atmo- 
sphere of goodness about her ; I felt as if I were breathing 
sincerity and frank innocence. It was refreshing to my lungs. 
Poor innocent child, she had faith in something; there was a 
crucifix and a sprig or two of green box above her poor 
little painted wooden bedstead ; I felt touched, or somewhat 
inclined that way. I felt ready to offer to charge no more 
than twelve per cent., and so give something towards estab- 
lishing her in a good way of business. 

“ 1 “ But may be she has a little youngster of a cousin, ” I 
said to myself, “who would raise money on her signature and 
sponge on the poor girl.” 

“ 1 So I went away, keeping my generous impulses well under 
control ; for I have frequently had occasion to observe that 
when benevolence does no harm to him who gives, it is the 
ruin of him who takes. When you came in I was thinking 
that Fanny Malvaut would make a nice little wife ; I was 
thinking of the contrast between her pure, lonely life and the 
life of the Countess — she has sunk as low as a bill of exchange 
already, she will sink to the lowest depths of degradation be- 
fore she has done ! ’ I scrutinized him during the deep 
silence that followed, but in a moment he spoke again. 
‘ Well,’ he said, ‘ do you think that it is nothing to have this 
power of insight into the deepest recesses of the human heart, 
to embrace so many lives, to see the naked truth underlying 
it all? There are no two dramas alike: there are hideous 
sores, deadly chagrins, love scenes, misery that soon will lay 
under the ripples of the Seine, young men’s joys that lead to 
the scaffold, the laughter of despair, and sumptuous banquets. 
Yesterday it was a tragedy. A worthy soul of a father 
drowned himself because he could not support his family. 
To-morrow it is a comedy; some youngster will try to rehearse 
the scene of M. Dimanche, brought up to date. You have 
heard people extol the eloquence of our latter-day preachers ; 
now and again I have wasted my time by going to hear them; 


324 


M. GOBSECK. 


they produced a change in my opinions, but in my conduct 
(as somebody said, I can’t recollect his name), in my con- 
duct — never ! Well, well ; these good priests and your Mira- 
beaus and Vergniauds and the rest of them are mere stam- 
mering beginners compared with these orators of mine. 

“ ‘ Often it is some girl in love, some gray-headed mer- 
chant on the verge of bankruptcy, some mother with a son’s 
wrong-doing to conceal, some starving artist, some great man 
whose influence is on the wane, and, for lack of money, is 
likely to lose the fruit of all his labors — the power of their 
pleading has made me shudder. Sublime actors such as these 
play for me, for an audience of one, and they cannot deceive 
me. I can look into their inmost thoughts, and read them as 
God reads them. Nothing is hidden from me. Nothing is 
refused to the holder of the purse-strings to loose and to 
bind. I am rich enough to buv the consciences of those who 
control the action of ministers, from their office boys to their 
mistresses. Is not that power ? I can possess the fairest 
women, receive their softest caresses ; is not that pleasure ? 
And is not your whole social economy summed up in terms 
of power and pleasure ? 

“ ‘There are ten of us in Paris, silent, unknown kings, the 
arbiters of your destinies. What is life but a machine set 
in motion by money? Know this for certain — methods are 
always confounded with results ; you will never succeed in 
separating the soul from the senses, spirit from matter. Gold 
is the spiritual basis of existing society. The ten of us are 
bound by the ties of common interest ; we meet on certain 
days of the week at the Cafe Themis near the Pont Neuf, and 
there, in conclave, we reveal the mysteries of finance. No 
fortune can deceive us ; we are in possession of family secrets 
in all directions. We keep a kind of “ Black Book,” in which 
we note the most important bills issued, drafts on public credit, 
or on banks, or given and taken in the course of business. 
We are the Casuists of the Paris Bourse, a kind of Inquisition 


M. GOBSECK. 


325 


weighing and analyzing the most insignificant actions of every 
man of any fortune, and our forecasts are infallible. One of 
us looks out over the judicial world, one over the financial, 
another surveys the administrative, and yet another the busi- 
ness world. I myself keep an eye on eldest sons, artists, peo- 
ple in the great world, and gamblers — on the most sensational 
side of Paris. Every one who comes to us lets us into his 
neighbor’s secrets. Thwarted passion and mortified vanity 
are great babblers. Vice and disappointment and vindictive- 
ness are the best of all detectives. My colleagues, like my- 
self, have enjoyed all things, are sated with all things, and 
have reached the point when power and money are loved for 
their own sake. 

“ ‘ Here,’ he said, indicating his bare, chilly room, ‘here 
the most high-mettled gallant, who chafes at a word and 
draws sword for a syllable elsewhere, will entreat with clasped 
hands. There is no city merchant so proud, no woman so 
vain of her beauty, no soldier of so bold a spirit, but that 
they entreat me here, one and all, with tears of rage or an- 
guish in their eyes- Here they kneel — the famous artist, and 
the man of letters, whose name will go down to posterity. 
Here, in short’ (he lifted his hand to his forehead), ‘all the 
inheritances and all the concerns of all Paris are weighed in 
the balance. Are you still of the opinion that there are no 
delights behind the blank mask which so often has amazed 
you by its impassiveness?’ he asked, stretching out that 
livid face which reeked of money. 

“I went back to my room, feeling stupefied. The little, 
wizened, old man had grown great. He had been metamor- 
phosed under my eyes into a strange visionary symbol ; he 
had come to be the power of gold personified. I shrank, 
shuddering, from life and my kind. 

“‘Is it really so?’ I thought; ‘must everything be re- 
solved into gold ? ’ 

“ I remember that it was long before I slept that night. I 


326 


M. GOBSECK. 


saw heaps of gold all about me. My thoughts were full of 
the lovely Countess ; I confess, to my shame, that the vision 
completely eclipsed another quiet, innocent figure, the figure 
of the woman who had entered upon a life of toil and ob- 
scurity; but on the morrow, through the clouds of slumber, 
Fanny’s sweet face rose before me in all its beauty, and I 
thought of nothing else.” 

“ Will you take a glass of eau sucree ?" asked the Vicom- 
tesse, interrupting Derville. 

“ I should be glad of it.” 

“ But I can see nothing in this that can touch our concerns,” 
said Mme. de Grandlieu, as she rang the bell. 

“ Sardanapalus ! ” cried Derville, flinging out his favorite 
invocation. “ Mademoiselle Camille will be wide awake in a 
moment if I say that her happiness depended not so long ago 
upon Daddy Gobseck ; but as the old gentleman died at the 
age of ninety, M. de Restaud will soon be in possession of a 
handsome fortune. This requires some explanation. As for 
Fanny Malvaut, you know her ; she is my wife.” 

“ Poor fellow, he would admit that, with his usual frank- 
ness, with a score of people to hear him ! ” said the Vicom- 
tesse. 

“I would proclaim it to the universe,” said the attorney. 

“ Go on, drink your glass, my poor Derville. You will 
never be anything but the happiest and the best of men.” 

“I left you in the Rue du Helder,” remarked the uncle, 
raising his face after a gentle doze. “You had gone to see a 
countess; what have you done with her?” 

“ A few days after my conversation with the old Dutch- 
man,” Derville continued, “ I sent in my thesis, and became 
first a licentiate in law, and afterwards an advocate. The old 
miser’s opinion of me went up considerably. He consulted 
me (gratuitously) on all the ticklish bits of business which he 


M. GOSBECK. 


m 


undertook when he had made quite sure how he stood, busi- 
ness which would have seemed unsafe to any ordinary prac- 
titioner. This man, over whom no one appeared to have the 
slightest influence, listened to my advice with something like 
respect. It is true that he always found that it turned out 
very well. 

“ At length I became head-clerk in the office where I had 
worked for three years, and then I left the Rue des Gres for 
rooms in my employer’s house. I had my board and lodging 
and a hundred and fifty francs per month. It was a great 
day for me ! 

“When I went to bid the usurer good-by, he showed no 
sign of feeling, he was neither cordial nor sorry to lose me, 
he did not ask me to come to see him, and only gave me one 
of those glances which seemed in some way to reveal a power 
of second-sight. 

“ By the end of the week my old neighbor came to see me 
with a tolerably thorny bit of business, an expropriation, and 
he continued to ask my advice with as much freedom as if he 
paid for it. 

“ My principal was a man of pleasure and expensive tastes ; 
before the second year (1818-1819) was out he had gotten him- 
self into difficulties, and was obliged to sell his practice. A 
professional connection in those days did not fetch the present 
exorbitant prices, and my principal asked a hundred and fifty 
thousand francs. Now an active man, of competent knowl- 
edge and intelligence, might hope to pay off the capital in ten 
years, paying interest and living respectably in the meantime — 
if he could command confidence. But I was the seventh 
child of a small tradesman at Noyon, I had not a sou to my 
name, nor personal knowledge of any capitalist but Daddy 
Gobseck. An ambitious idea, and an indefinable glimmer of 
hope, put heart into me. To Gobseck I betook myself, and 
slowly one evening I made my way to the Rue des Gres. My 
heart thumped heavily as I knocked at his door in the gloomy 


328 


M. GOBSECK. 


house. I recollected all the things that he used to tell me, 
at a time when I myself was very far from suspecting the vio- 
lence of the anguish awaiting those who crossed his threshold. 
Now it was I who was about to beg and pray like so many 
others. 

“‘Well, no, not that ,’ I said to myself; ‘an honest man 
must keep his self-respect wherever he goes. Success is not 
worth cringing for ; let us show him a front as decided as his 
own.’ 

“ Daddy Gobseck had taken my room since I left the house, 
so as to have no neighbor ; he had made a little grated win- 
dow too in his door since then, and did not open until he had 
taken a look at me and saw who I was. 

“‘Well,’ said he, in his thin, flute notes, ‘so your prin- 
cipal is selling his practice.’ 

“ ‘ How did you know that ? ’ said I ; ‘he has not spoken 
of it as yet except to me.’ 

“ The old man’s lips were drawn in puckers, like a curtain, 
to either corner of his mouth, as a soundless smile bore a hard 
glance company. 

“ ‘ Nothing else would have brought you here,’ he said 
drily, after a pause, which I spent in confusion. 

“ ‘ Listen to me, M. Gobseck,’ I began, with such serenity 
as I could assume before the old man, who gazed at me with 
steady eyes. There was a clear light burning in them that 
disconcerted me. 

“ He made a gesture as if to bid me ‘ Go on.’ ‘ I know 
that it is not easy to work on your feelings, so I will not waste 
my eloquence on the attempt to put my position before you — 
I am a penniless clerk, with no one to look to but you, and no 
heart in the world but yours can form a clear idea of my 
probable future. Let us leave hearts out of the question. 
Business is business, and business is not carried on with senti- 
mentality like romances. Now to the facts. My principal’s 
practice is worth in his hands about twenty thousand francs 


M. GOBSECK. 


329 


per annum ; in my hands, I think it would bring in forty 
thousand. He is willing to sell it for a hundred and fifty 
thousand francs. And here ,’ I said, striking my forehead, 
‘I feel that if you would lend me the purchase-money, I could 
clear it off in ten years’ time.’ 

“ 4 Come, that is plain speaking,’ said Daddy Gobseck, and 
he held out his hand and grasped mine. ‘ Nobody since I 
have been in business has stated the motives of his visit more 
clearly. Guarantees? ’ asked he, scanning me from head to 
foot. ‘ None to give,’ he added after a pause. * How old 
are you ? ’ 

“ ‘Twenty-five in ten days’ time,’ said I, ‘ or I could not 
open the matter.’ 

“ ‘ Precisely.’ 

“‘Well?’ 

“ ‘ It is possible.’ 

“ ‘ My word, we must be quick about it, or I shall have 
some one buying over my head.’ 

“ ‘Bring your certificate of birth round to-morrow morn- 
ing, and we will talk. I will think it over in the meantime,’ 
he replied. 

“ Next morning, at eight o’clock, I stood in the old man’s 
room. He took the document, put on his spectacles, coughed, 
spat, wrapped himself up in his black greatcoat, and read the 
whole certificate through from beginning to end. Then he 
turned it over and over, looked at me, coughed again, fidgeted 
about in his chair, and said, * We will try to arrange this bit 
of business.’ 

“ I trembled. 

“‘I make fifty per cent, on my capital,’ he continued, 

‘ sometimes I make a hundred, two hundred, five hundred 
per cent.’ 

“ I turned pale at the words. 

“ ‘But as we are acquaintances, I shall be satisfied to take 
twelve and a half per cent, per ’ — (he hesitated) — ‘ well, yes, 


M. GOBSEOC. 


330 

from vou I would be content to take thirteen per cent, per 
annum. Will that suit you ? ’ 

4 4 4 Yes,’ I answered. 

44 4 But if it is too much, stick up for yourself, Grotius ! ’ 
(a name he jokingly gave me). 4 When I ask you for thir- 
teen per cent., it is all in the way of business ; look into it, 
see if you can pay it ; I don’t like a man to agree too easily. 
Is it too much ? ’ 

44 4 No,* said I, 4 1 will make up for it by working a little 
harder.’ 

4 4 4 Gad ! your clients will pay for it ! ’ said he, looking at 
me wickedly out of the corner of his eyes. 

4 4 4 No, by all the devils in hell ! ’ cried I, 4 it shall be I 
‘ who will pay. I would sooner cut my hand off than flay 
people.’ 

4 4 4 Good-night,’ said Daddy Gobseck. 

4 4 4 Why, fees are all according to scale,’ I added. 

4 4 4 Not for compromises and settlements out of court, and 
cases where litigants come to terms,’ said he. 4 You can send 
in a bill for thousands of francs, six thousand even at a swoop 
(it depends on the importance of the case), for conferences 
with So-and-so, and expenses, and drafts, and memorials, and 
your jargon. A man must learn to look out for business of 
this kind. I will recommend you as a most competent, clever 
attorney. I will send you such a lot of work of this sort 
that your colleagues will be fit to burst with envy. Werbrust, 
Palma, and Gigonnet, my cronies, shall hand over their ex- 
propriations to you ; they have plenty of them, the Lord 
knows ! So you will have two practices — the one you are 
buying, and the other I will build up for you. You ought 
almost to pay me fifteen per cent, on my loan.’ 

4 4 4 So be it, but no more,’ said I, with the firmness which 
means that a man is determined not to concede another 
point. 

44 Daddy Gobseck’s face relaxed ; he looked pleased with me. 


M. GOBSECK . ; 


331 


“ 1 1 shall pay the money over to your principal myself/ 
said he, ‘ so as to establish a lien on the purchase and caution- 
money. ’ 

J 

“ ‘ Oh, anything you like in the way of guarantees.’ 

“ ‘ And besides that, you will give me bills for the amount 
made payable to a third party (name left blank), fifteen bills 
of ten thousand francs each.’ 

“ ‘ Well, so long as it is acknowledged in writing that this 
is a double ’ 

“‘No! ’ Gobseck broke in upon me. * No ! Why should 
I trust you any more than you trust me ? ’ 

“ I kept silence. 

“ 4 And furthermore/ he continued, with a sort of good- 
humor, ‘ you will give me your advice without charging fees 
so long as I live, will you not ? ’ 

“ ‘ So be it ; so long as there is no outlay.' 

“ ‘ Precisely,’ said he. ‘Ah, by-the-by, you will allow me 
to go to see you?’ (Plainly the old man found it not so 
easy to assume the air of good-humor.) 

“ ‘ I shall always be glad.’ 

“ ‘ Ah ! yes, but it would be very difficult to arrange of a 
morning. You will have your affairs to attend to, and I have 
mine.’ 

“ ‘Then come in the evening.’ 

“ ‘ Oh, no ! ’ he answered briskly, ‘you ought to go into 
society and see your clients, and I myself have my friends at 
my cafe.’ 

“ ‘ His friends ! ’ thought I to myself. ‘ Very well/ said I, 
‘ why not come at dinner-time? ’ 

“ ‘That is the time/ said Gobseck, ‘ after ’Change, at five 
o’clock. Good, you will see me Wednesdays and Saturdays. 
We will talk over business like a pair of friends. Aha ! I am 
gay, sometimes. Just give me the wing of a partridge and a 
glass of champagne, and we will have our chat together. I 
know a great many things that can be told now at this dis- 


332 


M. GOBSECK. 


tance of time ; I will teach you to know men, and what is 
more, women ? ’ 

“ ‘ Oh ! a partridge and a glass of champagne if you like.' 

“ ‘ Don’t do anything foolish, or I shall lose my faith in 
you. And don’t set up housekeeping in a grand way. Just 
one old general servant. I will come and see that you keep 
your health. I have capital invested in your head, he ! he ! 
so I am bound to look after you. There, come round in the 
evening, and bring your principal with you ! ’ 

“ ‘ Would you mind telling me, if there is no harm in 
asking, what was the good of my birth certificate in this 
business ? ’ I asked, when the little old man and I stood on 
the doorstep. 

“ Jean-Esther Van Gobseck shrugged his shoulders, smiled 
maliciously, and said, ‘ What blockheads youngsters are ! 
Learn, master attorney (for learn you must, if you don’t mean 
to be taken in), that integrity and brains in a man under 
thirty are commodities which can be mortgaged. After that 
age there is no counting on a man.’ 

“ And with that he shut the door. 

“ Three months later I was an attorney. Before very long, 
madame, it was my good-fortune to undertake the suit for the 
recovery of your estates. I won the day, and my name became 
known. In spite of the exorbitant rate of interest, I paid off 
Gobseck in less than five years. I married Fanny Malvaut, 
whom I loved with all my heart. There was a parallel between 
her life and mine, between our hard work and our luck, which 
increased the strength of feeling on either side. One of her 
uncles, a well-to-do farmer, died and left her seventy thousand 
francs, which helped to clear off the loan. From that day my 
life has been nothing but happiness and prosperity. Nothing 
is more utterly uninteresting than a happy man, so let us say 
no more on that head, and return to the rest of the characters. 

“ About a year after the purchase of the practice, I was 


M. GOBSECK. 


333 


digged into a bachelor breakfast-party given by one of our 
number who had lost a bet to a young man greatly in vogue 
in the fashionable world. M. de Trailles, the flower of the 
dandyism ot that day, enjoyed a prodigious reputation." 

“But he is still enjoying it," put in the Comte de Born. 
“ No one wears his clothes with a finer air, nor drives a tandem 
with a better grace. It is Maxime’s gift ; he can gamble, eat, 
and drink more gracefully than any man in the world. He 
is a judge of horses, hats, and pictures. All the women lose 
their heads over him. He always spends something like a 
hundred thousand francs a year, and no creature can discover 
that he has an acre of land or a single dividend warrant. The 
typical knight-errant of our salons, our boudoirs, our boule- 
vards, an amphibian half way between a man and a woman — 
Maxime de Trailles is a singular being, fit for anything, and 
good for nothing, quite as capable of perpetrating a benefit as 
of planning a crime ; sometimes base, sometimes noble, more 
often bespattered with mire than besprinkled with blood, 
knowing more of anxiety than of remorse, more concerned 
with his digestion than with any mental process, shamming 
passion, feeling nothing. Maxime de Trailles is a brilliant 
link between the hulks and the best society ; he belongs to the 
eminently intelligent class from which a Mirabeau, or a Pitt, 
or a Richelieu springs at times, though it is more wont to 
produce Counts of Horn, Fouquier-Tinvilles, and Coignards." 

“ Well," pursued Derville, when he had heard the Vicom- 
tesse’s brother to the end, “I had heard a good deal about 
this individual from poor Father Goriot, a client of mine ; and 
I had already been at some pains to avoid the dangerous 
honor of his acquaintance, for I came across him sometimes 
in society. Still, my chum was so pressing about this break- 
fast party of his that I could not well get out of it, unless I 
wished to earn a name for squeamishness. Madame, you could 
hardly imagine what a bachelor’s breakfast-party is like. It 
means superb display and a studied refinement seldom seen ; 


334 


M. GOBSECK. 


the luxury of a miser when vanity leads him to be sumptuous 
for a day. 

“ You are surprised as you enter the room at the neatness 
of the table, dazzling by reason of its silver and crystal and 
linen damask. Life is here in full bloom ; the young fellows 
are graceful to behold ; they smile and talk in low, demure 
voices like so many brides ; everything about them looks 
girlish. Two hours later you might take the room for a 
battlefield after the fight. Broken glasses, serviettes crumpled 
and torn to rags lie strewn about among the nauseous-looking 
remnants of food on the dishes. There is an uproar that 
stuns you, jesting toasts, a fire of witticisms and bad jokes ; 
faces are empurpled, eyes inflamed and expressionless ; unin- 
tentional confidences tell you the whole truth. Bottles are 
smashed, and songs trolled out in the height of a diabolical 
racket ; men call each other out, hang on each other’s necks, 
or fall to fisticuff's ; the room is full of a horrid, close scent 
made up of a hundred odors, and noise enough for a hundred 
voices. No one has any notion of what he is eating or drink- 
ing or saying. Some are depressed, others babble ; one will 
turn monomaniac, repeating the same word over and over 
again like a bell set jangling ; another tries to keep the tumult 
within bounds ; the steadiest will propose an orgie. If any 
one in possession of his faculties should come in, he would 
think that he had interrupted a Bacchanalian rite. 

“It was in the thick of such a chaos that M. de Trailles 
tried to insinuate himself into my good graces. My head was 
fairly clear, I was upon my guard. As for him, though he 
pretended to be decently drunk, he was perfectly cool, and 
knew very well what he was about. How it was done I do 
not know, but the upshot of it was that when we left Grig- 
non’s rooms about nine o’clock in the evening, M. de Trailles 
had thoroughly bewitched me. I had given him my promise 
that I would introduce him the next day to our Papa Gobseck. 
The words ‘honor,’ ‘virtue,’ ‘countess,’ ‘honest woman/ 


M. GOBSECK. 


335 


and ‘ ill-luck * were mingled in his discourse with magical 
potency, thanks to that golden tongue of his. 

“ When I awoke next morning, and tried to recollect what 
I had done the day before, it was with great difficulty that I 
could make a connected tale from my impressions. At last, 
it seemed to me that the daughter of one of my clients was 
in danger of losing her reputation, together with her hus- 
band’s love and esteem, if she could not get fifty thousand 
francs together in the course of the morning. There had 
been gaming debts, and carriage-builders’ accounts, money 
lost to heaven knows whom. My magician of a boon com- 
panion had impressed it upon me that she was rich enough to 
make good these reverses by a few years of economy. But 
only now did I begin to guess the reasons of his urgency. I 
confess, to my shame, that I had not the shadow of a doubt 
but that it was a matter of importance that Daddy Gobseck 
should make it up with this dandy. I was dressing when the 
young gentleman appeared. 

“ * M. le Comte,’ said I, after the usual greetings, ‘I fail 
to see why you should need me to effect an introduction to 
Van Gobseck, the most civil and smooth-spoken of capitalists. 
Money will be forthcoming if he has any, or rather, if you can 
give him adequate security.’ 

“ ‘ Monsieur,’ said he, ‘ it does not enter into my thoughts 
to force you to do me a service, even though you have passed 
your word.’ 

“ ‘ Sardanapalus ! ’ said I to myself, ‘ am I going to let that 
fellow imagine for one moment that I will not keep my word 
with him ? ’ 

“ ‘ I had the honor of telling you yesterday,’ said he, * that 
I had fallen out with Daddy Gobseck most inopportunely; 
and as there is scarcely another man in Paris who can come 
down on the nail with a hundred thousand francs, at the end 
of the month, I begged of you to make my peace with him. 
But let us say no more about it * 


336 


M. GOBSECK. 


“ M. de Trailles looked at me with civil insult in his 
expression, and made as if he would take his leave. 

“ ‘ I am ready to go with you,’ said I. 

“When we reached the Rue des Gres, my dandy looked 
about him with a circumspection and uneasiness that set me 
wondering. His face grew livid, flushed, and yellow, turn 
and turn about, and by the time that Gobseck’s door came in 
sight the perspiration stood in drops on his forehead. We 
were just getting out of the cabriolet, when a hackney cab 
turned into the street. My companion’s hawk’s-eye detected 
a woman in the depths of the vehicle. His face lighted up 
with a gleam of almost savage joy ; he called to a little boy 
who was passing, and gave him his horse to hold. Then we 
went up to the old bill-discounter. 

“ * M. Gobseck,’ said I, ‘ I have brought one of my most 
intimate friends to see you (whom I trust as I would trust the 
devil,’ I added for the old man’s private ear). ‘To oblige 
me you will do your best for him (at the ordinary rate), and 
pull him out of his difficulty (if it suits your convenience).’ 

“ M. de Trailles made his bow to M. Gobseck, took a seat, 
and listened to us with a courtier-like attitude ; its charming 
humility would have touched your heart to see, but my M. 
Gobseck sits in his chair by the fireside without moving a 
muscle or changing a feature. He looked very much like the 
statue of Voltaire under the peristyle of the Theatre-Frangais, 
as you see it of an evening ; he had partly risen as if to bow, 
and the skull cap that covered the top of his head, and the 
narrow strip of sallow forehead exhibited, completed his like- 
ness to the man of marble. 

“ ‘I have no money to spare except for my own clients, * 
said he. 

“ ‘ So you are cross because I may have tried in other 
quarters to ruin myself? ’ said the Count, laughing. 

“ ‘Ruin yourself! ’ repeated M. Gobseck ironically. 

“ ‘ Were you about to remark that it is impossible to ruin a 


M. GOBSECK. 


337 


man who has nothing? ’ inquired the dandy. ‘Why I defy 
you to find a better stock in Paris ! ’ he cried, sv/inging round 
on his heels. 

“ This half-earnest buffoonery produced not the slightest 
effect upon M. Gobseck. 

“ ‘Am I not on intimate terms with the Ronquerolles, the 
Marsays, the Franchessinis, the two Vandenesses, the Ajuda- 
Pintos — all the most fashionable young men in Paris, in short? 
A prince and an ambassador (you know them both) are my 
partners at play. I draw my revenues from London and 
Carlsbad and Baden and Bath. Is not this the most brilliant 
of all industries ! ’ 

“ ‘ True.’ 

“ ‘You make a sponge of me, begad ! so you do. You 
encourage me to go and swell myself out in society, so that 
you can squeeze me when I am hard up ; but you yourselves 
are sponges, just as I am, and death will give you a squeeze 
some day.’ 

“ ‘ That is possible.’ 

“ ‘ If there were no spendthrifts, what would become of 
you? The pair of us are like soul and body.’ 

“ ‘ Precisely so.’ 

“ ‘ Come, now, give us your hand, Grandaddy Gobseck, 
and be magnanimous if this is “ true ” and “ possible” and 
“ precisely so.” ’ 

“ ‘ You come to me,’ the usurer answered coldly, ‘because 
Girard, Palma, Werbrust, and Gigonnet are full up of your 
paper; they are offering it at a loss of fifty per cent.; and as 
it is likely they only gave you half the figure on the face of 
the bills, they are not worth five-and-twenty per cent, of their 
supposed value. I am your most obedient ! Can I in com- 
mon decency lend a stiver to a man who owes thirty thousand 
francs, and has not one farthing?’ M. Gobseck continued. 
‘ The day before yesterday you lost ten thousand francs at a 
ball at the Baron de Nucingen’s.’ 

22 


M. GOBSECK. 


838 

44 4 Sir/ said the Count, with rare impudence, 4 my affairs 
are no concern of yours,’ and he looked the old man up and 
down. 4 A man has no debts till payment is due.’ 

4 4 4 True.’ 

4 4 4 My bills will be duly met.’ 

4 4 4 That is possible.’ 

4 4 4 And at this moment the question between you and me 
is simply whether the security I am going to offer is sufficient 
for the sum I have come to borrow. ’ 

44 4 Precisely.’ 

44 A cab stopped at the door, and the sound of wheels filled 
the room. 

4 4 4 I will bring something directly which perhaps will satisfy 
you,’ cried the young man, and he left the room. 

4 4 4 Oh ! my son,’ exclaimed M. Gobseck, rising to his feet, 
and stretching out his arms to me, 4 if he has good security, 
you have saved my life. It would be the death of me. Wer- 
brust and Gigonnet imagined that they were going to play off 
a trick on me ; and now, thanks to you, I shall have a good 
laugh at their expense to-night.’ 

44 There was something frightful about the old man’s ecstasy. 
It was the one occasion when he opened his heart to me ; and 
that flash of joy, swift though it was, will never be effaced 
from my memory. 

4 4 4 Favor me so far as to stay here,’ he added. 4 1 am 
armed, and a sure shot. I have gone tiger-hunting, and 
fought on the deck when there was nothing for it but to 
win or die; but I don’t care to trust myself to yonder elegant 
scoundrel.’ 

44 He sat down again in his armchair before his bureau, and 
his face grew pale and impassive as before. 

4 4 4 Ah ! ’ he continued, turning to me, 4 you will see that 
lovely creature I once told you about ; I can hear a fine lady’s 
step in the corridor ; it is she, no doubt ; ’ and, as a matter 
of fact, the young man came in with a woman on his arm. I 


M. GOBSECK. 


339 


recognized the Countess, whose levee M. Gobseck had de- 
scribed for me, one of Father Goriot’s two daughters. 

“ The Countess did not see me at first ; I stayed where I 
was in the bay window, with my face against the pane ; but 
I saw her give Maxime a suspicious glance as she came into 
the money-lender’s damp, dark room. So beautiful was she, 
that in spite of her faults I felt sorry for her. There was a 
terrible storm of anguish in her heart ; the haughty, proud 
. features were drawn and distorted with pain which she strove 
in vain to disguise. The young man had come to be her evil 
genius. I admired M. Gobseck, whose perspicacity had fore- 
seen their future four years ago at the first bill which she 
endorsed. 

“ ‘ Probably,’ said I to myself, ‘ this monster with the angel’s 
face controls every possible spring of action in her : rules her 
through vanity, jealousy, pleasure, and the current of life in 
the world.’ ” 

The Vicomtesse de Grandlieu broke in on the story. 

“ Why, the woman’s very virtues have been turned against 
her,” she exclaimed. “ He has made her shed tears of devo- 
tion, he has brought out the utmost natural generosity of 
woman, and then abused her kindness and made her pay very 
dearly for unhallowed bliss.” 

Derville did not understand the signs which Mme. de 
Grandlieu made to him. 

“I confess,” he said, “ that I had no inclination to shed 
tears over the lot of this unhappy creature, so brilliant in 
society, so repulsive to eyes that could read her heart ; I shud- 
dered rather at the sight of her murderer, a young angel with 
such a clear brow, such red lips and white teeth, such a win- 
ning smile. There they stood before their judge, he scruti- 
nizing them much as some old fifteenth-centurv Dominican 
inquisitor might have peered into the dungeons of the Holy 
Office while the torture was administered to two Moors. 

“ The Countess spoke tremulously. ‘Sir,’ she said, ‘is 


340 


M. GOBSECK. 


there any way of obtaining the value of these diamonds, and 
of keeping the right of repurchase ? ’ She held out a jewel- 
case. 

“ ‘Yes, madame,’ I put in, and came forward. 

“ She looked at me, and a shudder ran through her as she 
recognized me, and gave me the glance which means, ‘ Say 
nothing of this,’ all the world over. 

“ ‘ This,’ said I, ‘ constitutes a sale with faculty of redemp- 
tion, as it is called, a formal agreement to transfer and deliver 
over a piece of property, either real estate or personalty, for 
a given time, on the expiration of which the previous owner 
recovers his title to the property in question, upon payment 
of a stipulated sum.’ 

“ She breathed more freely. The Count looked black ; he 
had grave doubts whether Gobseck would lend very much on 
the diamonds after such a fall in their value. Gobseck, im- 
passive as ever, had taken up his magnifying glass, and was 
quietly scrutinizing the jewels. If I were to live for a hun- 
dred years, I should never forget the sight of his face at that 
moment. There was a flush in his pale cheeks ; his eyes 
seemed to have caught the sparkle of the stones, for there was 
an unnatural glitter in them. He rose and went to the light, 
holding the diamonds close to his toothless mouth, as if he 
meant to devour them ; mumbling vague words over them, 
holding up bracelets, sprays, necklaces, and tiaras one after 
another, to judge of their water, whiteness, and cutting ; 
taking them out of the jewel-case and putting them in again, 
letting the play of the light bring out all their fires. He was 
more like a child than an old man ; or, rather, childhood 
and dotage seemed to meet in him. 

“ ‘ Fine stones ! The set would have fetched three hundred 
thousand francs before the Revolution. What water. Genu- 
ine Asiatic diamonds from Golconda or Visapur. Do you 
know what they are worth? No, no; no one in Paris but 
Gobseck can appreciate them. In the time of the empire 


M. GOBSECK. 


341 


such a set would have cost another two hundred thousand 
francs ! * 

“ He gave a disgusted shrug, and added — 

“ 1 But now diamonds are going down in value every day. 
The Brazilians have swamped the market with them since the 
peace; but the India stones are a better color. Others wear 
them now besides court ladies. Does madame go to court ? ’ 

“ While he flung out these terrible words, he examined one 
stone after another with delight which no words can describe. 

“ ‘ Flawless ! ’ he said. ‘ Here is a speck ! here is a 

flaw ! A fine stone that ! ’ 

“ His haggard face was so lighted up by the sparkling 
jewels, that it put me in mind of a dingy old mirror, such as 
you see in country inns. The glass receives every luminous 
image without reflecting the light, and a traveler bold enough 
to look for his face in it beholds a man in an apoplectic fit. 

“‘Well?’ asked the Count, clapping Gobseck on the 
shoulder. 

“ The old boy trembled. He put down his playthings on 
his bureau, took his seat, and was a money-lender once more 
— hard, cold, and polished as a marble column. 

“ ‘ How much do you want ? ’ 

“ ‘One hundred thousand francs for three years,’ said the 
Count. 

“ ‘That is possible,’ said Gobseck, and from a mahogany 
box (Gobseck’ s jewel-case) he drew out a faultlessly adjusted 
pair of scales ! 

“ He weighed the diamonds, calculating the value of stones 
and setting at sight (heaven knows how !), delight and 
severity struggling in the expression of his face the mean- 
while. The Countess was plunged in a kind of a stupor ; to 
me, watching her, it seemed that she was fathoming the 
depths of the abyss into which she had fallen. There was 
remorse still left in that woman’s soul. Perhaps a hand held 
out in human charity might save her, I would try. 


342 


M. GOBSECK. 


“‘Are the diamonds your personal property, madame?* 
I asked in a clear voice. 

“ ‘ Yes, monsieur,’ she said, looking at me with proud eyes. 

“ ‘ Make out the deed of purchase with power of redemp- 
tion, chatterbox,’ said Gobseck to me, resigning his chair at 
the bureau in my favor. 

“ ‘ Madame is without doubt a married woman?’ I tried 
again. 

“She nodded abruptly. 

“ ‘Then I will not draw up the deed,’ said I. 

“ ‘ x\nd why not? ’ asked M. Gobseck. 

“ ‘Why not?’ echoed I, as I drew the old man into the 
bay window so as to speak aside with him. ‘Why not? This 
woman is under her husband’s control ; the agreement would 
be void in law ; you could not possibly assert your ignorance 
of a fact recorded on the very face of the document itself. 
You would be compelled at once to produce the diamonds 
deposited with you, according to the weight, value, and cut- 
ting therein described.’ 

“M. Gobseck cut me short with a nod, and turned towards 
the guilty couple. 

“ ‘ He is right ! ’ he said. ‘ That puts the whole thing in 
a different light. Eighty thousand francs down, and you 
leave the diamonds with me,’ he added, in a husky, flute- 
like voice. ‘ In the way of property, possession is as good as 
a title.’ 

“ ‘But ’ objected the young man. 

“‘You can take it or leave it,’ continued M. Gobseck, 
returning the jewel-case to the lady as he spoke. 

“ ‘ I have too many risks to run.’ 

“ ‘ It would be better to throw yourself at your husband’s 
feet,’ I bent to whisper in her ear. 

“The usurer doubtless knew what I was saying from the 
movement of my lips. He gave me a cool glance. The 
Count’s face grew livid, The Countess was visibly wavering. 


M. GOBSECK. 


343 


Maxime stepped up to her, and, low as he spoke, I could 
catch the words — 

“ ‘ Adieu, dear Anastasie, may you be happy ! As for me, 
by to-morrow my troubles will be over.’ 

“ * Sir ! ’ cried the lady, turning to M. Gobseck, 4 I accept 
your offer.’ 

“ 4 Come, now,’ returned M. Gobseck. 4 You have been a 
long time in coming to it, my fair lady.’ 

“ He wrote out a cheque for fifty thousand francs on the 
Bank of France, and handed it to the Countess. 

“‘Now,’ continued he with a smile, such a smile as you 
will see in portraits of M. Voltaire, ‘ now I will give you the 
rest of the amount in bills, thirty thousand francs’ worth of 
paper as good as bullion. This gentleman here has just said, 
“My bills will be met when they are due,” ’ added he, pro- 
ducing certain drafts bearing the Count’s signature, all pro- 
tested the day before at the request of some of the confrater- 
nity, who had probably made them over to him (M. Gobseck) 
at a considerably reduced figure. 

“ The young man growled out something, in which the 
words ‘ Old scoundrel ! ’ were audible. Daddy Gobseck did 
not move an eyebrow. He drew a pair of pistols out of a 
pigeon-hole, remarking cooly — 

“ ‘ As the insulted man, I fire first.* 

“ ‘ Maxime, you owe this gentleman an explanation,* cried 
the trembling Countess in a low voice. 

“ 4 I had no intention of giving offense,’ stammered 
Maxime. 

“‘Iam quite sure of that,’ M. Gobseck answered calmly ; 
4 you had no intention of meeting your bills, that was all.’ 

“ The Countess rose, bowed, and vanished, with a great 
dread gnawing her, I doubt not. M. de Trailles was bound 
to follow, but before he went he managed to say — 

“ ‘ If either of you gentlemen should forget himself, I will 
have his blood, or he will have mine.’ 

M 


344 


M. GOBSECK. 


“‘Amen!’ called Daddy Gobseck as he put his pistols 
back in their place ; ‘ but a man must have blood in his veins 
though before he can risk it, my son, and you have nothing 
but mud in yours.’ 

“When the door was closed, and the two vehicles had 
gone, M. Gobseck rose to his feet and began to prance about. 

“ ‘ I have the diamonds ! I have the diamonds ! ’ he cried 
again and again, ‘ the beautiful diamonds ! such diamonds ! 
and tolerably cheap, too. Aha ! aha ! Werbrust and Gigonnet, 
you thought you had old Papa Gobseck ! Ego sum papa ! 
I am master of the lot of you ! Paid ! paid, principal and 
interest ! How silly they will look to-night when I shall come 
out with this story between two games of dominoes ! ’ 

“The dark glee, the savage ferocity aroused by the posses- 
sion of a few water-white pebbles, set me shuddering. I was 
dumb with amazement. 

“‘Aha! There you are, my boy!’ said he. ‘We will 
dine together. We will have some fun at your place, for I 
haven’t a home of my own, and these restaurants, with their 
broths, and sauces, and wines, would poison the devil hirm 
self.’ 

“ Something in my face suddenly brought back the usual 
cold, impassive expression to his. 

“ ‘You don’t understand it,’ he said, and, sitting down by 
the hearth, he put a tin saucepan full of milk on the brasier. 
‘ Will you breakfast with me ? ’ continued he. ‘ Perhaps 
there will be enough here for two.’ 

“ ‘ Thanks,’ said I, ‘ I do not breakfast till noon.’ 

“ I had scarcely spoken before hurried footsteps sounded 
from the passage. The stranger stopped at M. Gobseck’ s 
door and rapped ; there was that in the knock which sug- 
gested a man transported with rage. M. Gobseck reconnoitred 
him through the grating ; then he opened the door, and in 
came a man of thirty-five or so, judged harmless apparently 
in spite of his anger. The new-comer, who was quite plainly 


M GOBSECK. 


345 


dressed, bore a strong resemblance to the late Due de Riche- 
lieu. You must often have met him, he was the Countess’ 
husband, a man with the aristocratic figure (permit the ex- 
pression to pass) peculiar to statesmen of your Faubourg. 

“‘Sir,’ said this person, addressing himself to M. Gob- 
seck, who had quite recovered his tranquillity, ‘ did my wife 
go out of this house just now ? ’ 

“ * That is possible.’ 

“ ‘ Well, sir, do you not take my meaning?’ 

“‘I have not the honor of the acquaintance of my lady 
your wife,’ returned Gobseck. ‘ I have had a good many 
visitors this morning, women and men, and mannish young 
ladies, and young gentlemen who look like young ladies. I 
should find it very hard to say ’ 

“ ‘ A truce to jesting, sir ! I mean the woman who has 
this moment gone out from you.’ 

“‘How can I know whether she is your wife or not? I 
never had the pleasure of seeing you before.’ 

“ ‘You are mistaken, M. Gobseck,’ said the Count, with 
profound irony in his voice. ‘ We have met before, one 
morning in my wife’s bedroom. You had come to demand 
payment for a bill — no bill of hers.’ 

“ ‘ It was no business of mine to inquire what value she had 
received for it,’ said M. Gobseck, with a malignant look at 
the Count. ‘ I had come by the bill in the way of business. 
At the same time, monsieur,’ continued M. Gobseck, quietly 
pouring coffee into his bowl of milk, without a trace of ex- 
citement or hurry in his voice, ‘ you will permit me to observe 
that your right to enter my house and expostulate with me is 
far from proven to my mind. I came of age in the sixty-first 
year of the preceding century.’ 

“‘Sir,’ said the Count, ‘you have just bought family 
diamonds, which do not belong to my wife, for a mere trifle.’ 

“‘Without feeling it incumbent upon me to tell you my 
private affairs, I will tell you this much, M. le Comte — if 


346 


M. GOBSECK. 


Mme. la Comtesse has taken your diamonds, you should have 
sent a circular round to all the jewelers, giving them notice 
not to buy them ; she might have sold them separately.’ 

“ ‘ You know my wife, sir ! ’ roared the Count. 

“ ‘True.’ 

“ ‘ She is in her husband’s power.’ 

“ ‘ That is possible.’ 

“ ‘ She had no right to dispose of those diamonds 

“ ‘ Precisely.’ 

“ ‘ Very well, sir ? ’ 

“ ‘ Very well, sir. I knew your wife, and she is in her hus- 
band’s power ; I am quite willing, she is in the power of a 
good many people; but — I — do — not — know — your diamonds. 
If Mme. la Comtesse can put her name to a bill, she can go 
into business of course, and buy and sell diamonds on her 
own account. The thing is plain on the face of it ! ’ 

‘ ‘ ‘ Good-day, sir ! ’ cried the Count, now white with rage. 
* There are courts of justice.’ 

“ ‘ Quite so.’ 

“ ‘ This gentleman here,’ he added, indicating me, ‘was a 
witness of the sale.’ 

“ That is possible.’ 

“ The Count turned to go. Feeling the gravity of the 
affair, I suddenly put in between the two belligerents. 

“ ‘ M. le Comte,’ said I, ‘you are right, and M. Gobseck 
is by no means in the wrong; You could not prosecute the 
purchaser without bringing your wife into court, and the 
whole of the odium would not fall on her. I am an attorney, 
and I owe it to myself, and still more to my professional posi- 
tion, to declare that the diamonds of which you speak were 
purchased by M. Gobseck in my presence ; but, in my opin- 
ion, it would be unwise to dispute the legality of the sale, 
especially as the goods are not readily recognizable. In equity 
your contention would lie, in law it would collapse. M. Gob- 
seck is too honest a man to deny that the sale was a profitable 


M GOBSECK. 


347 


transaction, more especially as my conscience, no less than 
my duty, compels me to make the admission. But once bring 
the case into a court of law, M. le Comte, the issue would be 
doubtful. My advice to you is to come to terms with M. 
Gobseck, who can plead that he bought the diamonds in all 
good faith ; you would be bound in any case to return the 
purchase money. Consent to an arrangement, with power to 
redeem at the end of seven or eight months, or a year even, 
or any convenient lapse of time, for the repayment of the 
sum borrowed by Mine, la Comtesse, unless you would prefer 
to repurchase them outright and give security for repayment.’ 

“ Gobseck dipped his bread into the bowl of coffee, and ate 
with perfect indifference; but at the words ‘come to terms,’ 
he looked at me as much as to say, ‘ A fine fellow that ! he 
has learned something from my lessons ! ’ And I, for my 
part, riposted with a glance, which he understood uncom- 
monly well. The business was dubious and shady; there was 
pressing need of coming to terms. Gobseck could not deny 
all knowledge of it, for I should appear as a witness. The 
Count thanked me with a smile of good-will. 

“In the debate which followed, Gobseck showed greed 
enough and skill enough to baffle a whole congress of diplo- 
matists; but in the end I drew up an instrument, in which 
the Count acknowledged the receipt of eighty-five thousand 
francs, interest included, in consideration of which Gobseck 
undertook to return the diamonds to the Count. 

“ ‘What waste! ’ exclaimed he as he put his signature to 
the agreement. ‘ How is it possible to bridge such a gulf? ’ 

“ ‘ Have you many children, sir?’ Gobseck asked gravely. 

“The Count winced at the question; it was as if the old 
money-lender, like an experienced physician, had put his finger 
at once on the sore spot. The Comtesse’s husband did not 
reply. 

“‘Well,’ said Gobseck, taking the pained silence for an- 
swer, ‘ I know your story by heart. The woman is a fiend, 


348 


M GOBSECK 


but perhaps you love her still ; I can well believe it ; she 
made an impression on me. Perhaps, too, you would rather 
save your fortune, and keep it for one or two of your chil- 
dren? Well, fling yourself into the whirlpool of society, lose 
that fortune at play, come to Gobseck pretty often. The 
world will say that I am a Jew, a Tartar, a usurer, a pirate, 
will say that I have ruined you ! I snap my fingers at 
them ! If anybody insults me, I lay my man out ; nobody 
is a surer shot nor handles a rapier better than your servant. 
And every one knows it. Then, have a friend — if you can 
find one — and make over your property to him by a fictitious 
sale. You call that a fidei commtssum, don’t you?’ he asked, 
turning to me. 

“The Count seemed to be entirely absorbed in his own 
thoughts. 

“ ‘You shall have your money to-morrow,’ he said, ‘have 
the diamonds in readiness,’ and he went. 

“ ‘ There goes one who looks to me to be as stupid as an 
honest man,’ M. Gobseck said coolly when the Count had 
gone. 

“ ‘ Say rather stupid as a man of passionate nature.’ 

“ ‘ The Count owes you your fee for drawing up the agree- 
ment ! ’ M. Gobseck called after me as I took my leave. 

“ One morning, a few days after the scene which initiated 
me into the terrible depths beneath the surface of the life of a 
woman of fashion, the Count came into my private office. 

“ ‘ I have come to consult you on a matter of grave mo- 
ment,’ he said, ‘ and I begin by telling you that I have perfect 
confidence in you, as I hope to prove to you. Your behavior 
to Mme. de Grandlieu is above all praise,’ the Count went 
on. (You see, madame, that you have paid me a thousand 
times over for a very simple matter.) 

“ I bowed respectfully, and replied that I had done nothing 
but the duty of an honest man. 


M. GOBSECK. 


349 


“ 1 Well/ the Count went on, ‘ I have made a great many 
inquiries about the singular personage to whom you owe your 
position. And from all that I can learn, M. Gobseck is a 
philosopher of the Cynic school. What do you think of his 
probity? ’ 

“ 1 M. le Comte/ said I, ‘ M. Gobseck is my benefactor — 
at fifteen per cent./ I added, laughing. ‘ But his avarice does 
not authorize me to paint him to the life for a stranger’s 
benefit.’ 

“ ‘ Speak out, sir. Your frankness cannot injure M. Gob- 
seck or yourself. I do not expect to find an angel in a 
pawnbroker.’ 

“ * Daddy Gobseck/ I began, ‘ is intimately convinced of 
the truth of the principle which he takes for a rule of life. In 
his opinion, money is a commodity which you may sell cheap 
or dear, according to circumstances, with a clear conscience. 
A capitalist, by charging a high rate of interest, becomes in 
his eyes a secured partner by anticipation in the profits of a 
paying concern or speculation. Apart from the peculiar philo- 
sophical views of human nature and financial principles, which 
enable him to behave like a usurer, I am fully persuaded that, 
out of his business, he is the most loyal and upright soul in 
Paris. There are two men in him ; he is petty and great — a 
miser and a philosopher. If I were to die and leave a family 
behind me, he would be the guardian whom I should appoint. 
This was how I came to see M. Gobseck in this light, mon- 
sieur. I know nothing of his past life. He may have been 
a pirate, may, for anything I know, have been all over the 
world, trafficking in diamonds, or men, or women, or state 
secrets ; but this I affirm of him — never has human soul been 
more thoroughly tempered and tried. When I paid off my 
loan, I asked him, with a little circumlocution of course, how 
it was that he had made me pay such an exorbitant rate of 
interest ; and why, seeing that I was a friend, and he meant 
to do me a kindness, he should not have yielded to the wish 


M. GOBSECK. 


350 

and made it complete. “ My son/’ he said, u I released you 
from all need to feel any gratitude by giving you ground for 
the belief that you owed me nothing.” So we are the best 
friends in the world. That answer, monsieur, gives you the 
man better than any amount of description.’ 

“ ‘ I have made up my mind once and for all/ said the 
Count. ‘ Draw up the necessary papers ; I am going to 
transfer my property to Gobseck. I have no one but you to 
trust to in the draft of the counter-deed, which will declare 
that this transfer is a simulated sale, and that Gobseck as 
trustee will administer my estate (as he knows how to admin- 
ister), and undertakes to make over my fortune to my eldest 
son when he comes of age. Now, sir, this I must tell you : 
I should be afraid to have that precious document in my own 
keeping. My boy is so fond of his mother, that I cannot 
trust him with it. So dare I beg of you to keep it for me? 
In case of death, Gobseck would make you legatee of my 
property. Every contingency is provided for.’ 

“ The Count paused for a moment. He seemed greatly 
agitated. 

“ * A thousand pardons,’ he said at length ; ‘ I am in great 
pain, and have very grave misgivings as to my health. Recent 
troubles have disturbed me very painfully, and forced me to 
take this great step.’ 

“ ‘ Allow me first to thank you, monsieur,’ said I, 1 for the 
trust you place in me. But I am bound to deserve it by 
pointing out to you that you are disinheriting your — other 
children. They bear your name. Merely as the children of 
a once-loved wife, now fallen from her position, they have a 
claim to an assured existence. I tell you plainly that I cannot 
accept the trust with which you propose to honor me unless 
their future is secured.’ 

“ The Count trembled violently at the words, and tears 
came into his eyes as he grasped my hand, saying, ‘ I did not 
know my man thoroughly. You have made me both glad and 


M. GOBSECK. 351 

sorry. We will make provision for the children in the 

counter-deed.’ 

“ I went with him to the door ; it seemed to me that there 
was a glow of satisfaction in his face at the thought of this 
act of justice. 

“Now, Camille, this is how a young wife takes the first 
step to the brink of a precipice. A quadrille, a ballad, a 
picnic party is sometimes cause sufficient of frightful evils. 
You are hurried on by the presumptuous voice of vanity and 
pride, on the faith of a smile or through giddiness and folly ! 
Shame and misery and remorse are three furies awaiting every 
woman the moment she oversteps the limits ” 

“Poor Camille can hardly keep awake,” the Vicomtesse 
hastily broke in. “ Go to bed, child; you have no need of 
appalling pictures to keep you pure in heart and conduct.” 

Camille de Grandlieu took the hint and went. 

“You were going rather too far, dear M. Derville,” said 
the Vicomtesse, “ an attorney is not a mother of daughters 
nor yet a preacher.” 

“ But any newspaper is a thousand times ” 

“Poor Derville!” exclaimed the Vicomtesse, “what has 
come over you ? Do you really imagine that I allow a 
daughter of mine to read the newspapers? Go on,” she 
added after a pause. 

“ Three months after everything was signed and sealed 
between the Count and Gobseck ” 

“ You can call him the Comte de Restaud, now that Camille 
is not here,” said the Vicomtesse. 

“ So be it ! Well, time went by, and I saw nothing of the 
counter-deed, which by rights should have been in my hands. 
An attorney in Paris lives in such a whirl of business that 
with certain exceptions which we make for ourselves, we have 
not the time to give each individual client the amount of 
interest which he himself takes in his affairs. Still, one day 
when Gobseck came to dine with me, I asked him as we left 


352 


M. GOBSECK. 


the table if he knew how it was that I had heard no more of 
M. de Restaud. 

“‘There are excellent reasons for that,’ he said; ‘the 
noble Count is at death’s door. He is one of the soft stamp 
that cannot learn how to put an end to chagrin, and allow it 
to wear them out instead. Life is a craft, a profession ; every 
man must take the trouble to learn that business. When tie 
has learned what life is by dint of painful experiences, the 
fibre of him is toughened, and acquires a certain elasticity, so 
that he has his sensibilities under his own control ; he disci- 
plines himself till his nerves are like steel springs, which 
always bend, but never break ; given a sound digestion, and 
a man in such training ought to live as long as the cedars of 
Lebanon, and famous trees they are.’ 

“ ‘ Then is the Count actually dying ? ’ I asked. 

“ ‘ That is possible,’ said Gobseck ; ‘ the winding up of his 
estate will be a juicy bit of business for you.’ 

“ I looked at my man, and said, by way of sounding him — 

“ ‘ Just explain to me how it is that we, the Count and I, 
are the only men in whom you take an interest ? ’ 

“‘Because you are the only two who have trusted me 
without finessing,’ he said. 

“Although this answer warranted my belief that Gobseck 
would act fairly even if the counter-deed were lost, I resolved 
to go to see the Count. I pleaded a business engagement, 
and we separated. 

“I went straight to the Rue du Helder, and was shown 
into a room where the Countess sat playing with her children. 
When she heard my name, she sprang up and came to meet 
me, then she sat down and pointed without a word to a chair 
by the fire. Her face wore the inscrutable mask beneath 
which women of the world conceal their most vehement 
emotions. Trouble had withered that face already. Nothing 
of its beauty now remained, save the marvelous outlines in 
which its principal charm had lain. 


M. GOBSECK. 


353 


“ 4 It is essential, madame, that I should speak to M. le 
Comte ’ 

“ ‘ If so, you would be more favored than I am,’ she said, 
interrupting me. ‘ M. de Restaud will see no one. He will 
hardly allow his doctor to come, and will not be nursed even 
by me. When people are ill, they have such strange fancies ! 
They are like children, they do not know what they want.’ 

“ ‘Perhaps, like children, they know very well what they 
want.’ 

“The Countess reddened. I almost repented a thrust 
worthy of Gobseck. So, by way of changing the conversa- 
tion, I added, ‘ But M. de Restaud cannot possibly lie there 
alone all day, madame.’ 

“ ‘ His oldest boy is with him,’ she said. 

“ It was useless to gaze at the Countess ; she did not blush 
this time, and it looked to me as if she were resolved more 
firmly than ever that I should not penetrate into her secrets. 

“‘You must understand, madame, that my proceeding 

is no way indiscreet. It is strongly to his interest ’ I 

bit my lips, feeling that I had gone the wrong way to work. 
The Countess immediately took advantage of my slip. 

“ ‘ My interests are in no way separate from my husband’s, 
sir,’ said she. ‘ There is nothing to prevent you addressing 
yourself to me ’ 

“ ‘ The business which brings me here concerns no one but 
M. le Comte,’ I said firmly. 

“ ‘ I will let him know of your wish to see him.’ 

“ The civil tone and expression assumed for the occasion 
did not impose upon me ; I divined that she would never 
allow me to see her husband. I chatted on about indifferent 
matters for a little while, so as to study her; but, like all 
women who have once begun to plot for themselves, she could 
dissimulate with the rare perfection which, in your sex, means 
the last degree of perfidy. If I may dare to say it, I looked 
for anything from her, even a crime. She produced this 
23 


354 


M. GOBSECK. 


feeling in me, because it was so evident from her manner and 
in all that she did or said, down to the very inflections of her 
voice, that she had an eye to the future. I went. 

“ Now I will pass on to the final scenes of this adventure, 
throwing in a few circumstances brought to light by time, 
and some details guessed by Gobseck’s perspicacity or by my 
own. 

“ When the Comte de Restaud apparently plunged into the 
vortex of dissipation, something passed between the husband 
and wife, something which remains an impenetrable secret, 
but the wife sank even lower in the husband’s eyes. As soon 
as he became so ill that he was obliged to take to his bed, he 
manifested his aversion for the Countess and the two youngest 
children. He forbade them to enter his room, and any 
attempt to disobey his wishes brought on such dangerous 
attacks that the doctor implored the Countess to submit to 
her husband’s wish. 

“ Mme. de Restaud had seen the family estates and prop- 
erty, nay, the very mansion in which she lived, pass into the 
hands of Gobseck, who appeared to play the fantastic part of 
ogre so far as their wealth was concerned. She partially 
understood what her husband was doing, no doubt. M. de 
Trailles was traveling in England (his creditors had been a 
little too pressing of late), and no one else was in a position 
to enlighten the lady, and explain that her husband was 
taking precautions against her at Gobseck’s suggestion. It 
is said that she held out for a long while before she gave the 
signature required by French law for the sale of the property ; 
nevertheless the Count gained his point. The Countess was 
convinced that her husband was realizing his fortune, and that 
somewhere or other there would be a little bunch of notes 
representing the amount ; they had been deposited with a 
notary, or perhaps at the bank, or in some safe hiding-place. 
Following out her train of thought, it was evident that M. de 
Restaud must of necessity have some kind of document in 


M GOBSECK. 


355 


his possession by which any remaining property could be 
recovered and handed over to his son. 

“ So she made up her mind to keep the strictest possible 
watch over the sick-room. She ruled despotically in the 
house, and everything in it was submitted to this feminine 
espionage. All day she sat in the salon adjoining her hus- 
band’s room, so that she could hear every syllable that he 
uttered, every least movement that he made. She had a bed 
put there for her of a night, but she did not sleep very much. 
The doctor was entirely in her interests. Such wifely devo- 
tion seemed praiseworthy enough. With the natural subtlety 
of perfidy, she took care to disguise M. de Restaud’s repug- 
nance for her, and feigned distress so perfectly that she gained 
a sort of celebrity. Straight-laced women were even found to 
say that she had expiated her sins. Always before her eyes 
she beheld a vision of the destitution to follow on the Count’s 
death if her presence of mind should fail her; and in these 
ways the wife, repulsed from the bed of pain on which her 
husband lay and groaned, had drawn a charmed circle round 
about it. So near, yet kept at a distance ; all-powerful, but 
in disgrace, the apparently devoted wife was lying in wait for 
death and opportunity; crouching like the ant-lion at the 
bottom of his spiral pit, ever on the watch for the prey that 
cannot escape, listening to the fall of every grain of sand. 

“ The strictest censor could not but recognize that the 
Countess pushed maternal sentiment to the last degree. Her 
father’s death had been a lesson to her, people said. She 
worshiped her children. They were so young that she could 
hide the disorders of her life from their eyes, and could win 
their love ; she had given them the best and most brilliant 
education. I confess that I cannot help admiring her and 
feeling sorry for her. Gobseck used to joke me about it. 
Just about that time she had discovered Maxime’s baseness, 
and was expiating the sins of the past in tears of blood. I 
am sure of it. Hateful as were the measures which she took 


356 


M. GOBSECK. 


for regaining control of her husband’s money, were they not 
the result of a mother’s love, and a desire to repair the wrongs 
she had done her children? And again, it may be, like 
many a woman who has experienced the storms of lawless 
love, she felt a longing to lead a virtuous life again. Perhaps 
she only learned the worth of that life when she came to reap 
the woful harvest sown by her errors. 

“ Every time that little Ernest came out of his father’s 
loom, she put him through a searching examination as to all 
that his father had done or said. The boy willingly complied 
with his mother’s wishes, and told her even more than she 
asked in her anxious affection, as he thought. 

“My visit was a ray of light for the Countess. She was 
determined to see in me the instrument of the Count’s venge- 
ance, and resolved that I should not be allowed to go near 
the dying man. I augured ill of all this, and earnestly wished 
for an interview, for I was not easy in my mind about the fate 
of the counter-deed. If it should fall into the Countess’ 
hands, she might turn it to her own account, and that would 
be the beginning of a series of interminable lawsuits between 
her and Gobseck. I knew the usurer well enough to feel 
convinced that he would never give up the property to her ; 
there was room for plenty of legal quibbling over a series of 
transfers, and I alone knew all the ins and outs of the matter. 
I was minded to prevent such a tissue of misfortune, so I went 
to the Countess a second time. 

“I have noticed, madame,” said Derville, turning to the 
Vicomtesse, and speaking in a confidential tone, “ certain 
moral phenomena to which we do not pay enough attention. 
I am naturally an observer of human nature, and instinctively 
I bring a spirit of analysis to the business that I transact in 
the interest of others, when human passions are called into 
lively play. Now, I have often noticed, and always with new 
wonder, that two antagonists almost always divine each 
other’s inmost thoughts and ideas. Two enemies sometimes 


M. GOB SEC K. 


357 


possess a power of clear insight into mental processes, and 
read each other’s minds as two lovers read in either soul. So 
when we came together, the Countess and I, I understood at 
once the reason of her antipathy for me, disguised though it 
was by the most gracious forms of politeness and civility. I 
had been forced to be her confidant, and a woman cannot 
but hate the man before whom she is compelled to blush. 
And she on her side knew that if I was the man in whom her 
husband placed confidence, that husband had not as yet given 
up his fortune. 

“I will spare you the conversation, but it abides in my 
memory as one of the most dangerous encounters in my 
career. Nature had bestowed on her all the qualities which, 
combined, are irresistibly fascinating ; she could be pliant 
and proud by turns, and confiding and coaxing in her man- 
ner; she even went so far as to try to arouse curiosity and 
kindle love in her effort to subjugate me. It was a failure. 
As I took my leave of her, I caught a gleam of hate and rage 
in her eyes that made me shudder. We parted enemies. She 
would fain have crushed me out of existence ; and for my 
own part, I felt pity for her, and for some natures pity is the 
deadliest of insults. This feeling pervaded the last represen- 
tations I put before her ; and when I left her, I left, I think, 
dread in the depths of her soul, by declaring that, turn which 
way she would, ruin lay inevitably before her. 

“ * If I were to see M. le Comte, your children’s property 
at any rate would ’ 

“ < I should be at your mercy,’ she said, breaking in upon 
me, disgust in her gesture. 

“ Now that we had spoken frankly, I made up my mind 
to save the family from impending destitution. I resolved to 
strain the law at need to gain my ends, and this was what I 
did. I sued the Comte de Restaud for a sum of money, 
ostensibly due to Gobseck, and gained judgment. The 
Countess, of course, did not allow him to know of this, but I 


358 


M. GOBSECK. 


had gained my point, I had a right to affix seals to everything 
on the death of the Count. I bribed one of the servants in 
the house — the man undertook to let me know at any hour of 
the day or night if his master should be at the point of death, 
so that I could intervene at once, scare the Countess with a 
threat of affixing seals, and so secure the counter-deed. 

“ I learned later on that the woman was studying the Code, 
with her husband’s dying moans in her ears. If we could 
picture the thoughts of those who stand about a death-bed, 
what fearful sights should we not see ? Money is always the 
motive-spring of the schemes elaborated, of all the plans that 
are made and the plots that are woven about it ! Let us leave 
these details, nauseating in the nature of them ; but perhaps 
they may have given you some insight into all that this hus- 
band and wife endured ; perhaps too they may unveil much 
that is passing in secret in other houses. 

“ For two months the Comte de Restaud lay on his bed, 
alone, and resigned to his fate. Mortal disease was slowly 
sapping the strength of mind and body. Unaccountable and 
grotesque sick fancies preyed upon him ; he would not suffer 
them to set his room in order, no one should nurse him, he 
would not even allow them to make his bed. All his sur- 
roundings bore the marks of this last degree of apathy, the 
furniture was out of place, the daintiest trifles were covered 
with dust and cobwebs. In health he had been a man of re- 
fined and expensive tastes, now he positively delighted in the 
comfortless look of the room. A host of objects required in 
illness — rows of medicine bottles, empty and full, most of 
them dirty; crumpled linen, and broken plates — littered the 
writing-table, chairs, and chimney-pieces. An open warming- 
pan lay on the floor before the grate ; a bath, still full of 
mineral water, had not been taken away*. The sense of com- 
ing dissolution pervaded all the details of an unsightly chaos. 
Signs of death appeared in things inanimate before the 
destroyer came to the body on the bed. The Comte de 


M. GOBSECK. 


359 


Restaud could not bear the daylight, the Venetian shutters 
were closed, darkness deepened the gloom in the dismal 
chamber. The sick man himself had wasted greatly. All 
the life in him seemed to have taken refuge in the still bril- 
liant eyes. The livid whiteness of his face was something 
horrible to see, enhanced as it was by the long dank locks of 
hair that straggled along his cheeks, for he would never suffer 
them to cut it. He looked like some religious fanatic in the 
desert. Mental suffering was extinguishing all human instincts 
in this man of scarce fifty years of age, whom all Paris had 
known as so brilliant and so successful. 

“One morning at the beginning of December, 1824, he 
looked up at Ernest, who sat at the foot of his bed gazing at 
his father with wistful eyes. 

“ ‘ Are you in pain ? ’ the little Vicomte asked. 

“ ‘ No,’ said the Count, with a ghastly smile, ‘ it all lies 
here and about my heart ! ’ 

“ He pointed to his forehead, and then laid his wasted 
fingers on his hollow chest. Ernest began to cry at the sight. 

“ ‘ How is it that M. Derville does not come to me? ’ the 
Count asked his servant (he thought that Maurice was really 
attached to him, but the man was entirely in the Countess' 
interest) — ‘What! Maurice!’ and the dying man suddenly 
sat upright in his bed, and seemed to recover all his presence 
of mind, ‘ I have sent for my attorney seven or eight times 
during the last fortnight, and he does not come ! ’ he cried. 
* Do you imagine that I am to be trifled with? Go for him, 
at once, this very instant, and bring him back with you. If 
you do not carry out my orders, I shall get up and go myself.’ 

“ ‘ Madame,’ said the man as he came into the salon, ‘ you 
heard M. le Comte ; what ought I to do? ’ 

“ ‘ Pretend to go to the attorney, and when you come back, 
tell your master that his man of business is forty leagues away 
from Paris on an important lawsuit. Say that he is expected 
back at the end of the week. Sick people never know how 


360 


M. GOBSECK. 


ill they are/ thought the Countess ; 4 he will wait till the man 
comes home.’ 

“ The doctor had said on the previous evening that the 
Count could scarcely live through the day. When the servant 
came back two hours later to give that hopeless answer, the 
dying man seemed to be greatly agitated. 

f ‘ 4 O God !’ he cried again and again, ‘ I put my trust in 
none but Thee.’ 

“ For a long while he lay and gazed at his son, and spoke in 
a feeble voice at last. 

“ ‘ Ernest, my boy, you are very young ; but you have a 
good heart ; you can understand, no doubt, that a promise 

given to a dying man is sacred ; a promise to a father 

Do you feel that you can be trusted with a secret, and keep it 
so well and closely that even your mother herself shall not 
know that you have a secret to keep? There is no one else in 
this house whom I can trust to-day. You will not betray my 
trust, will you ? ’ 

“ ‘ No, father.’ 

“ ‘ Very well, then, Ernest, in a minute or two I will give 
you a sealed packet that belongs to M. Derville ; you must 
take such care of it that no one can know that you have it ; 
then you must slip out of the house and put the letter into the 
post-box at the corner.’ 

“ * Yes, father.’ 

“ ‘ Can I depend upon you ? ’ 

“ ‘ Yes, father.’ 

“ ‘ Come and kiss me. You have made death less bitter to 
me, dear boy. In six or seven years’ time you will under- 
stand the importance of this secret, and you will be well 
rewarded then for your quickness and obedience, you will 
know then how much I love you. Leave me alone for a min- 
ute, and let no one — no matter whom — come in meanwhile.’ 

“ Ernest went out and saw his mother standing in the next 
room. • 


M. GOBSECK. 


361 


“ ‘Ernest/ said she ‘come here.’ 

“ She sat down, drew her son to her knees and clasped him 
in her arms and held him tightly to her heart. 

“ ‘ Ernest, your father said something to you just now.’ 

“ ‘ Yes, mamma.’ 

“ ‘ What did he say ? ’ 

“ ‘ I cannot repeat it, mamma.’ 

“ ‘Oh, my dear child,’ cried the Countess, kissing him in 
rapture. ‘ You have kept your secret ; how glad that makes 
me ! Never tell a lie ; never fail to keep your word — those 
are two principles which should never be forgotten.* 

“ ‘ Oh ! mamma, how beautiful you are ! You never told a 
lie, I am quite sure.’ 

“ ‘ Once or twice, Ernest dear, I have lied. Yes, and I 
have not kept my word under circumstances which speak 
louder than all precepts. Listen, my Ernest, you are big 
enough and intelligent enough to see that your father drives 
me away, and will not allow me to nurse him, and this is 
not natural, for you know how much I love him.* 

“ ‘ Yes, mamma.* 

“The Countess began to cry. ‘Poor child!’ she said, 
‘ this misfortune is the result of treacherous insinuations. 
Wicked people have tried to separate me from your father to 
satisfy their greed. They mean to take all our money from 
us and to keep it for themselves. If your father were well, 
the division between us would soon be over ; he would listen 
to me ; he is loving and kind ; he would see his mistake. 
But now his mind is affected, and his prejudices against me 
have become a fixed idea, a sort of mania with him. It is 
one result of his illness. Your father’s fondness for you is 
another proof that his mind is deranged. Until he fell ill 
you never noticed that he loved you more than Pauline or 
Georges. It is all caprice with him now. In his affection 
for you he might take it into his head to tell you to do things 
for him. If you do not want to ruin us all, my darling, and 


362 


M. GOBSECK, 


to see your mother begging her bread like a pauper woman, 
you must tell her everything ’ 

“ ‘ Ah ! ’ cried the Count. He had opened the door and 
stood there, a sudden, half-naked apparition, almost as thin 
and fleshless as a skeleton. 

“ His smothered cry produced a terrible effect upon the 
Countess ; she sat motionless, as if a sudden stupor had seized 
her. Her husband was as white and wasted as if he had risen 
out of his grave. 

“ ‘ You have filled my life to the full with trouble, and now 
you are trying to vex my death-bed, to warp my boy’s mind, 
and make a depraved man of him ! ’ he cried hoarsely. 

“ The Countess flung herself at his feet. His face, working 
with the last emotions of life, was almost hideous to see.” 

“ ‘ Mercy ! mercy ! ’ she cried aloud, shedding a torrent 
of tears. 

“ ‘ Have you shown me any pity ? ’ he asked. ‘ I allowed 
you to squander your own money, and now do you mean to 
squander my fortune, too, and ruin my son ? ’ 

“ ‘ Ah ! well, yes, have no pity for me, be merciless to me ! * 
she cried. ‘ But the children? Condemn your widow to live 
in a convent ; I will obey you ; I will do anything, anything 
that you bid me, to expiate the wrong I have done you, if 
that only the children may be happy ! The children ! Oh, 
the children ! ’ 

“ ‘ I have only one child,’ said the Count, stretching out a 
wasted arm, in his despair, towards his son. 

“‘Pardon a penitent woman, a penitent woman! ’ 

wailed the Countess, her arms about her husband’s damp feet. 
She could not speak for sobbing ; vague, incoherent sounds 
broke from her parched throat. 

“ ‘You dare to talk of penitence after all that you said to 
Ernest ! ’ exclaimed the dying man, shaking off the Countess, 
who lay groveling at his feet. ‘ You turn me to ice ! ’ he 
added, and there was something appalling in the indifference 
































































































CLOTHES AND PAPERS AND RAGS LAY TOSSED ABOUT IN 

CON FUSION, 











































M. GOBSECK. 


363 


with which he uttered the words. * You have been a bad 
daughter ; you have been a bad wife ; you will be a bad 
mother.’ 

“ The wretched woman fainted away. The dying man 
reached his bed and lay down again, and a few hours later 
sank into unconsciousness. The priests came and adminis- 
tered the sacraments. 

“At midnight he died; the scene that morning had ex- 
hausted his remaining strength, and on the stroke of mid- 
night I arrived with Daddy Gobseck. The house was in 
confusion, and under cover of it we walked up into the little 
salon adjoining the death-chamber. The three children were 
there in tears, with two priests, who had come to watch with 
the dead. Ernest came over to me, and said that his mother 
desired to be alone in the Count’s room. 

“ ‘ Do not go in,’ he said ; and I admired the child for his 
tone and gesture ; ‘ she is praying there.’ 

“Gobseck began to laugh that soundless laugh of his, but 
I felt too much touched by the feeling in Ernest’s little face 
to join in the miser’s sardonic amusement. When Ernest 
saw that we moved towards the door, he planted himself in 
front of it, crying out, ‘ Mamma, here are some gentlemen in 
black who want to see you ! ’ 

“ Gobseck lifted Ernest out of the way as if the child had 
been a feather, and opened the door. 

“What a scene it was that met our eyes ! The room was 
in frightful disorder ; clothes and papers and rags lay tossed 
about in a confusion horrible to see in the presence of death ; 
and there, in the midst, stood the Countess in disheveled de- 
spair, unable to utter a word, her eyes glittering. The Count 
had scarcely breathed his last before his wife came in and 
forced open the drawers and the desk ; the carpet was strewn 
with litter, some of the furniture and boxes were broken, the 
signs of violence could be seen everywhere. But if her search 
had at first proved fruitless, there was that in her excitement 


364 


M. GOBSECK. 


and attitude which led me to believe that she had found the 
mysterious documents at last. I glanced at the bed, and pro- 
fessional instinct told me all that had happened. The mat- 
tress had been flung contemptuously down by the bedside, 
and across it, face downwards, lay the body of the Count, 
like one of the paper envelopes that strewed the carpet — he 
too was nothing now but an envelope. There was something 
grotesquely horrible in the attitude of the stiffening, rigid 
limbs. 

“ The dying man must have hidden the counter-deed under 
his pillow to keep it safe so long as life should last ; and his 
wife must have guessed his thought ; indeed, it might be read 
plainly in his last dying gesture, in the convulsive clutch of 
his claw-like hands. The pillow had been flung to the floor 
at the foot of the bed ; I could see the print of her heel upon 
it. At her feet lay a paper with the Count’s arms on the 
seals ; I snatched it up, and saw that it was addressed to me. 
I looked steadily at the Countess with the pitiless clear-sighted- 
ness of an examining magistrate confronting a guilty creature. 
The contents were blazing in the grate ; she had flung them 
on the fire at the sound of our approach, imagining, from a 
first hasty glance at the provisions which I had suggested for 
her children, that she was destroying a will which disinherited 
them. A tormented conscience and involuntary horror of 
the deed which she had done had taken away all power of 
reflection. She had been caught in the act, and possibly the 
scaffold was rising before her eyes, and she already felt the 
felon’s branding iron. 

“ There she stood gasping for breath, waiting for us to 
speak, staring at us with haggard eyes, and every feature 
manifesting a guilty conscience. 

“ I went across to the grate and pulled out an unburned 
fragment. ‘ Ah, madame ! ’ I exclaimed, ‘ you have ruined 
your children ! Those papers were their titles to their prop- 
erty.’ 


M. GOBSECK. 


365 


“ Her mouth twitched, she looked as if she were threatened 
by a paralytic seizure. 

“ 4 Eh ! eh ! ’ cried Gobseck ; the harsh, shrill tone grated 
upon our ears like the sound of a brass candlestick scratching 
a marble surface. 

“ There was a pause, then the old man turned to me and 
said quietly — 

“ ‘ Do you intend Mme. la Comtesse to suppose that I am 
not the rightful owner of the property sold to me by her late 
husband ? This house belongs to me now.’ 

“A sudden blow on the head from a bludgeon would have 
given me less pain and astonishment. The Countess saw the 
look of hesitation in my face. 

“ ‘ Monsieur,’ she cried, ‘ Monsieur ! ’ She could find no 
other words. 

“ ‘ You are a trustee, are you not ? ’ I asked. 

“ ‘ That is possible.’ 

“ ‘Then do you mean to take advantage of this crime of 
hers ? ’ 

“ ‘ Precisely.’ 

“ I went at that, leaving the Countess sitting by her hus- 
band’s bedside, shedding hot tears. Gobseck followed me. 
Outside in the street I separated from him, but he came after 
me, flung me one of those searching glances with which he 
probed men’s minds, and said in the husky flute-tones, pitched 
in a shriller key — 

“ ‘ Do you take it upon yourself to judge me? ’ 

“From that time forward we saw little of each other. 
Gobseck let the Count’s mansion on lease ; he spent the 
summers on the country estates. He was a lord of the manor 
in earnest, putting up farm buildings, repairing mills and 
roadways, and planting timber. I came across him one day 
in a walk in the Jardin des Tuileries. 

“ ‘The Countess is behaving like a heroine,’ said l; ‘she 


366 


M. GOBSECK. 


gives herself up entirely to the children’s education ; she is 
giving them a perfect bringing up. The oldest boy is a 
charming young fellow ’ 

•‘ ‘ That is possible.’ 

“ ‘ But ought you not to help Ernest ? ’ I suggested. 

“‘Help him!’ cried Gobseck. ‘Not I! Adversity is 
the greatest of all teachers; adversity teaches us to know the 
value of money and the worth of men and women. Let him 
set sail on the seas of Paris ; when he is a qualified pilot, we 
will give him a ship to steer.’ 

“ I left him without seeking to explain the meaning of his 
words. 

“ M. de Restaud’s mother has prejudiced him against me, 
and he is very far from taking me as his legal adviser ; still, I 
went to see Gobseck last week to tell him about Ernest’s love 
for Mile. Camille, and pressed him to carry out his contract, 
since that young Restaud is just of age. 

“ I found that the old-bill discounter had been kept to his 
bed for a long time by the complaint of which he was to die. 
He put me off, saying that he would give the matter his atten- 
tion when he could get up again and see after his business ; 
his idea being no doubt that he would not give up any of his 
possessions so long as the breath was in him ; no other reason 
could be found for his shuffling answer. He seemed to me to 
be much worse than he at all suspected. I stayed with him 
long enough to discern the progress of a passion which age 
had converted into a sort of craze. He wanted to be alone 
in the house, and had taken the rooms one by one as they fell 
vacant. In his own room he had changed nothing ; the fur- 
niture which I knew so well sixteen years ago looked the same 
as ever ; it might have been kept under a glass case. Gob- 
seck’s faithful old portress, with her husband, a pensioner, 
who sat in the entry while she was upstairs, was still his house- 
keeper and charwoman, and now in addition his sick-nurse. 
In spite of his feebleness, Gobseck saw his clients himself as 


M. GOBSECK. 


367 


heretofore, and received sums of money ; his affairs had been 
so simplified, that he only needed to send his pensioner out 
now and again on an errand, and could carry on business in 

his bed. 

“After the treaty, by which France recognized the Haytian 
Republic, Gobseck was one of the members of the commission 
appointed to liquidate claims and assess repayments due by 
Hayti ; his special knowledge of old fortunes in San Domingo, 
and the planters and their heirs and assigns to whom the in- 
demnities were due, had led to his nomination. Gobseck’s 
peculiar genius had then devised an agency for discounting the 
planters’ claims on the government. The business was carried 
on under the names of Werbrust and Gigonnet, with whom he 
shared the spoil without disbursements, for his knowledge was 
accepted instead of capital. The agency was a sort of distillery, 
in which money was extracted from doubtful claims, and the 
claims of those who knew no better, or had no confidence in 
the government. As a liquidator, Gobseck could make terms 
with the large landed proprietors ; and these, either to gain a 
higher percentage of their claims or to ensure prompt settle- 
ments, would send him presents in proportion to their means. 
In this way presents came to be a kind of percentage upon 
sums too large to pass through his control, while the agency 
bought up cheaply the small and dubious claims, or the claims 
of those persons who preferred a little ready money to a de- 
ferred and somewhat hazy repayment by the Republic. Gob- 
seck was the insatiable boa-constrictor of the great business. 
Every morning he received his tribute, eyeing it like a Na- 
bob’s prime minister, as he considers whether he will sign a 
pardon. Gobseck would take anything, from the present of 
game sent him by some poor devil or the pound’s weight of 
wax-candles from devout folk, to the rich man’s plate and the 
speculator’s gold snuff-box. Nobody knew what became of 
the presents sent to the old money-lender. Everything went 
in, but nothing came out. 


368 


M GOBSECK. 


“ ‘ On the word of an honest woman,’ said the portress, 
an old acquaintance of mine, ‘ I believe he swallows it all 
and is none the fatter for it ; he is as thin and dried up as the 
cuckoo in the clock.’ 

“ At length, last Monday, Gobseck sent his pensioner for 
me. The man came up to my private office. 

“ ‘ Be quick and come, M. Derville,’ said he, ‘ the gov- 
ernor is just going to hand in his checks ; he has grown as 
yellow as a lemon ; he is fidgeting to speak with you ; death 
has fair hold of him ; the rattle is working in his throat.’ 

“ When I entered Gobseck’s room, I found the dying man 
kneeling before the grate. If there was no fire on the hearth, 
there was at any rate a monstrous heap of ashes. He had 
dragged himself out of bed, but his strength had failed him, 
and he could neither go back nor fmd^voice to complain. 

“ ‘ You felt cold, old friend,’ I said, as I helped him back 
to his bed ; * how can you do without a fire ? ’ 

“ ‘ I am not cold at all,’ he said. 4 ‘ No fire here ! no fire ! 
I am going, I know not where, lad,’ he went on, glancing at 
me with blank, lightless eyes, 1 but I am going away from 
this. I have carpology ,’ said he (the use of the technical term 
showing how clear and accurate his mental processes were even 
now). ‘ I thought the room was full of live gold, and I got 
up to catch some of it. To whom will all mine go, I wonder? 
Not to the Crown ; I have left a will, look for it, Grotius. 
“The Holland Belle” had a daughter; I once saw the girl 
somewhere or other, in the Rue Vivienne, one evening. They 
call her “ La Torpille,” I believe ; she is as pretty as pretty 
can be; look her up, Grotius. You are my executor; take 
what you like ; help yourself. There are Strasbourg pies 
there, and bags of coffee, and sugar, and gold spoons. Give 
the Odiot service to your wife. But who is to have the 
diamonds ? Are you going to take them, lad ? There is 
snuff too — sell it at Hamburg, tobaccos are worth half as much 
again at Hamburg. All sorts of things I have, in fact, and 


M. GOBSECK. 


369 


now I must go and leave them all. Come, Papa Gobseck, no 
weakness, be yourself ! ’ 

“ He raised himself in bed, the lines of his face standing 
out as sharply against the pillow as if the profile had been cast 
in bronze ; he stretched out a lean arm and bony hand along 
the coverlet and clutched it, as if so he would fain keep his 
hold on life, then he gazed hard at the grate, cold as his own 
metallic eyes, and died in full consciousness of death. To us 
— the portress, the old pensioned and myself— he looked like 
'one of the old Romans standing behind the consuls in Leth- 
iere’s picture of the 4 Death of the Sons of Brutus.’ 

“‘He was a good-plucked one, the old Lascar ! ’ said the 
pensioner in his soldierly fashion. 

“ Rut as for me, the dying man’s fantastical enumeration of 
his riches was still sounding in my ears, and my eyes, follow- 
ing the direction of his, rested on that heap of ashes. It 
struck me that it - was very large. I took the tongs, and, as 
soon as I stirred the cinders, I felt the metal underneath, a 
mass of gold and silver coins, receipts taken during his illness, 
doubtless, after he grew too feeble to lock the money up, 
and could trust no one to take it to the bank for him. 

“ ‘Run for the justice of the peace,’ said I, turning to the 
old pensioner, * so that everything can be sealed here at 
once.’ 

“Gobseck’s last words and the old portress’ remarks had 
struck me. I took the keys of the rooms on the first and 
second floor to make a visitation. The first door that I 
opened revealed the meaning of the phrases which I took for 
mad ravings ; and I saw the length to which covetousness goes 
when it survives only as an illogical instinct, the last stage of 
greed of which you find so many examples among misers in 
country towns v 

“ In the room next to the one in which Gobseck had died, 
a quantity of eatables of all kinds were stored — putrid pies, 
moldy fish, nay, even shell-fish ; the stench almost choked 
24 


370 


M. GO BSE CUT. 


me. Maggots and insects swarmed. These comparatively 
recent presents were put down, pell-mell, among chests of 
tea, bags of coffee, and packing-cases of every shape. A 
silver soup tureen on the chimney-piece was full of advices of 
the arrival of goods consigned to his order at Havre, bales of 
cotton, hogsheads of sugar, barrels of rum, coffees, indigo, 
tobaccos, a perfect bazaar of colonial produce. The room 
itself was crammed with furniture, and silver-plate, and 
lamps, and vases, and pictures ; there were books, and curi- 
osities, and fine engravings lying rolled up, unframed. Per- 
haps these were not all presents, and some part of this vast 
quantity of stuff had been deposited with him in the shape of 
pledges, and had been left on his hands in default of pay- 
ment. I noticed jewel-cases, with ciphers and armorial bear- 
ings stamped upo-n them, and sets of fine table-linen, and 
weapons of price ; but none of the things were docketed. I 
opened a book which seemed to be misplaced, and found a 
thousand-franc note in it. I promised myself that I would go 
through everything thoroughly ; I would try the ceilings, and 
floors, and walls, and cornices to discover all the gold, 
hoarded with such passionate greed by a Dutch miser worthy 
of a Rembrandt’s brush. In all the course of my profes- 
sional career I have never seen such impressive signs of the 
eccentricity of avarice. 

“ I went back to his room, and found an explanation of 
this chaos and accumulation of riches in a pile of letters 
lying under the paper-weights on his desk — Gobseck’s cor- 
respondence with the various dealers to whom doubtless he 
usually sold his presents. These persons had, perhaps, fallen 
victims to Gobseck’s cleverness, or Gobseck may have wanted 
fancy prices for his goods ; at any rate, every bargain hung in 
suspense. He had not disposed of the eatables to Chevet, be- 
cause Chevet would only take them of him at a loss of thirty 
per cent. Gobseck haggled for a few francs between the prices, 
and while they wrangled the goods became unsalable. Again, 


M GOBSECK , ; 


371 


Gobseck had refused free delivery of his silver-plate, and de- 
clined to guarantee the weights of his coffees. There had 
been a dispute over each article, the first indication in Gob- 
seck of the childishness and incomprehensible obstinacy of 
age, a condition of mind reached at last by all men in whom 
a strong passion survives the intellect. 

“ I said to myself, as he had said, ‘ To whom will all these 
riches go ? ’ And when I think of the grotesque infor- 

mation he gave me as to the present address of his heiress, I 
foresee that it will be my duty to search all the houses of 
ill-fame in Paris to pour out an immense fortune on some 
worthless jade. But, in the first place, know this — that 
in a few days’ time Ernest de Restaud will come into a for- 
tune to which his title is unquestionable, a fortune which will 
put him in a position to marry Mile. Camille, even after 
adequate provision has been made for his mother the Comtesse 
de Restaud, and his sister and brother.” 

“ Well, dear M. Derville, we will think about it,” said 
Mme. de Grandlieu. “ M. Ernest ought to be very wealthy 
indeed if such a family as ours must accept that mother of his. 
Bear in mind that my son will be the Due de Grandlieu one 
day; he will unite the estates of both the houses that bear our 
name, and I wish him to have a brother-in-law to his mind.” 

“ But Restaud bears gules, a traverse argent , on four 
scutcheons or, a cross sable, and that is a very pretty coat of 
arms.” 

“That is true,” said the Vicomtesse; “and, besides, 
Camille need not see her mother-in-law.” 

“Mme. de Beauseant used to receive Mme. de Restaud,” 
said the gray-haired uncle. 

“Oh! that was at her great crushes,” replied the Vicom- 
tesse. 


Paris , January, 1830. 




























* 















. 

. 












. 






































URSULE MIROUET 
MADAME FIRMIANI 
A FORSAKEN WOMAN 
THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS 













































PREFACE. 


“ Ursule Mirouet,” dedicated by Balzac to his niece, 
Sophie Surville, and avowedly written “in the fear of the 
young person,” or, as the author more elegantly puts it, “ in 
uncompromising respect of the noble principles of a pious 
education,” exposes itself by the very fact to two different 
sorts of prejudice. It is sure to be cried up by one set of 
judges as “ wholesome,” and to be cried down by another as 
“ goody.” 

The latter charge is certainly unfair, for Balzac has by no 
means written the book in rose-pink and sky-blue only, nor 
has he been afraid to show things more or less as they are. 
Nevertheless, it is difficult not to admit that evidences of 
restraint and convention do exist. Ursule — even more than 
Eugenie, who becomes a person on at least two occasions, her 
struggle with her father, and her revanche over her cousin — is 
a thing of shreds and patches, an ideal being in whom that 
mysterious “candor,” to which the French attach such 
excessive value in a girl, and which they make such haste to 
do away with altogether in a woman, seems to shut out all 
positive individuality. She is very nice; but she is not very 
human. 

Nor can the machinery of dreams, hypnotism, Swedenbor- 
gianism, and what not, which Balzac, following out one of 
his well-known manias, chose to work into the book, be said 
to add very largely to its verisimilitude. It contrasts too 
sharply with the extremely prosaic, if not always very prob- 
able, details of Minoret-Levrault’s theft of the will, and of 
the jealousy of the heirs, which it is interesting to contrast 
with Dickens’ management of the same subject in “ Great 

N ( ix ) 


X 


PREFACE. 


Expectations.” How far this combination is artistically pos- 
sible or advisable is a question of abstract criticism into 
which we need not enter. I think it does not require much 
argument to prove that Balzac has not, as a matter of fact, 
quite shown the possibility or the desirableness here. I do 
not know in the work of a man of genius a more striking 
instance of the wisdom of the principle, Nee Deus intersit , 
to which, in our day, Horace would certainly have given the 
form, “ Keep the supernatural in fiction out, unless you can’t 
manage with the natural.” 

However, even this may be a question of opinion ; and it 
is at least worth while to point out that in this book Balzac 
has anticipated, very curiously and interestingly, a large class 
of English fiction of a later day, which, in its turn, has been 
imitated in France. The whole scheme, indeed, of “ Ursule 
Mirouet,” by no means owing only to its respect of the young 
person, though doubtless partly owing to this, is far more 
that of an English novel than of a French. The absence of 
the usual “triangle,” and of all courtship of married women, 
together with the difficulty (which a Frenchman even now, to 
some extent, experiences, and experienced much more in 
Balzac’s days), of making very much of “honest” love 
scenes between man and maid, put Balzac’s always fertile 
invention upon hunting out and setting to work other sources 
of interest, which, with the possible exception of the dream- 
and-vision part of the book, he has, as a rule, engineered 
very happily. Even the love affair between Ursule and Sav- 
inien de Portenduere is not to be contemptuously spoken of ; 
and the figure of Savinien is very pleasantly touched. It is 
to be noted that even Balzac’s favorite heroes of unprincipled 
convention — Marsay, Rastignac, and the rest — exhibit them- 
selves less theatrically in their dealings with the youthful 
Vicomte than in almost any other of their numerous appear- 
ances. Marsay’s theory of debt may be amusingly and 
advantageously contrasted with the opposite, but in a certain 


PREFACE. 


xi 


sense complementary, remarks of George Warrington on 
the same subject in “ Pendennis.” Madame de Portenduere, 
too, is good, and not overdone. 

On the cabals against Ursule opinions may perhaps differ. 
It is not easy to say that anything is improbable in the case 
of a stupid malefactor like Minoret-Levrault ; and odisse 
quem laseris is an eternal verity. Still, one would rather 
have been inclined to suppose that the postmaster, having 
been so completely successful in his theft, would instinctively 
feel that it was wiser to let Ursule alone. The malignity of 
Goupil, too, seems a little overdone, and the whole character 
of this agreeable lawyer’s clerk again presents mutatis mutan- 
dis something of the eccentric extravagance of Dickens, 
between whom and Balzac the parallel is perpetually fasci- 
nating, because of its constant intermixture of likenesses and 
contrasts. 

But the comic personages generally must be said to be very 
good. They are not overdone, as the great English novelist 
just referred to would probably have overdone them ; indeed, 
Balzac has been distinctly sober and sparing in the delineation 
of their “humors.” Dickens certainly, and most English 
novelists probably, would have been tempted to bring much 
more to the front poor Madame Cremiere’s linguistic pecu- 
liarities. These will remind everybody of Mrs. Malaprop, 
though they are more like a historical but much less famous 
example, the “ Lingo Grande,” which Southey in divers 
letters to Grosvenor Bedford puts into the mouth of his sister- 
in-law, Mrs. Coleridge. The doctor, the magistrate, the cure, 
the public prosecutor, and all the powers that be play their 
parts well, and more than a mere good word is deserved by 
Desire Minoret, to whom Balzac has been rather cruel. 

The doctor himself is a more problematical character. 
His conversion smacks a little of the stage ; and it certainly 
might seem that such an experienced personage, well aware 
of the ferocity of the fortune-hunters who surrounded him, 


PREFACE. 


• • 
xu 

would have taken rather more pains to put the future of Ursule 
out of danger by lodging a duplicate will somewhere, or 
availing himself of some of the devices in which French law, 
even under the Code Napoleon, is nearly as fertile as English. 
But the testamentary unreason of mankind is a sufficiently 
well-authenticated fact to justify Balzac. 

Altogether, the book, if not exactly in the first-class for 
power, takes high rank for variety of interest and for the 
peculiar character of its scheme. It has no duplicate in its 
author’s work, and we could not spare it. “ Ursule Mirouet” 
first appeared in a newspaper, Le Messager , in the issues of 
August 25 to September 23 inclusive ; and when next year it 
was published in two volumes by Souverain, it had, as it had 
in the periodical, twenty-one chapters with headings. Yet 
another year, and it lost these chapters, and all divisions 
except the two part-headings of “ The Heirs in Alarm ” and 
“The Minoret Property,” and took place in the third edition 
of the “ Scenes de La Vie de Province,” and the first of the 
“ Com6die ” generally. 

The three short stories which follow the title story are each 
quite characteristic of the author’s style and manner. The 
various descriptions of the heroine in “Madame Firmiani ” 
have a point and sparkle which are almost peculiar to the not 
quite mature works of men of genius, and the actual story 
has a lightness which perhaps would have disappeared if 
Balzac had handled it at greater length. “ A Forsaken 
Woman ” partakes more of the character of an anecdote than 
that of a story ; yet, withal, the account of the first meeting 
of Madame de Beauseant and M. de Nueil is positively good ; 
and the introduction, with its sketch of what Balzac knew or 
dreamed to be society, has the merit of most of his overtures. 
“ The Imaginary Mistress ” may be called somewhat fantastic, 
and the final trait, whether false or not to nature, will pro- 
voke some critics. But the devotion of Paz is exactlv one 
of those things which suited Balzac best, and which he could 


PREFACE. 


xm 

handle most effectively. “ Madame Firmiani ” was first pub- 
lished in the Revue de Paris for February, 1832 ; then 
became a “ Conte Philosophique,” and still in the same year 
a “ Scene de la Vie Parisienne.” It was in the 1842 collec- 
tion that it took up its abode in the “ Scenes de la Vie 
Priv6e.” “ A Forsaken Woman” appeared in the same pe- 
riodical in September of the same year, was a “ Scene de la 
Vie de Province” next year, and was shifted to the “Vie 
Priv6e ” when the “ Comedie ” was first arranged. “The 
Imaginary Mistress” made its appearance about the same 
period, and took position in the “ Scenes de la Vie Priv6e. 

G. S. 



t 













'f:j‘ air 

•I' ’ ' • •• 

''' •' ■ ' 5 . . . . 




































■ 



















URSULE MIROUET 


To Mademoiselle Sophie Surville. 

It is a real pleasure , my dear niece , to dedicate to 
you a book of which the ‘subject and the details have 
gained the approbation — so difficult to secure — of a 
young girl to whom the world is yet unknown , and 
who will make no compromise with the high principles 
derived fro?n a pious education. You young girls are 
a public to be dreaded ; you ought never to be suffered 
to read any book less pure than your own pure souls , 
and you are forbidden cert am books, just as you are not 
allowed to see society as it really is. Is it not enough , 
then , to make a writer proud, to know that he has 
satisfied you ? Heaven gra?it that affection may not 
have misled you / Who can say ? The future only , 
which you , I hope , will see , though he ?nay not , who is 
your uncle 

De Balzac. 


I. 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 

As you enter Nemours coming from Paris, you cross the 
canal of the Loing, whose banks form a rural rampart to the 
pretty little town, and afford many picturesque walks. Since 
1830, unfortunately, many houses have been built beyond the 
bridge. If this suburb increases, the aspect of the town will 
lose much of its attractive originality. 

But in 1829 the country on each side of the road lay open, 

*( 1 ) 


2 


UR RULE MIROUET. 

and the postmaster, a tall, burly man of about sixty, as he sat 
on the highest point of the bridge one fine morning, could 
command a view of what he would have called a ribbon-road. 

The month of September was lavishing its wealth. The 
atmosphere quivered with heat above the grass and stones, 
not a cloud flecked the ethereal blue, of which the vivid trans- 
parency was uniform to the very horizon, showing the extreme 
rarity of the air. Indeed, Minoret-Levrault, the postmaster 
in question, was obliged to shade his eyes with his hand not 
to be quite dazzled. Out of patience with waiting, he looked 
now at the lovely meadows spreading away to the right, where 
his after-crop was growing apace, and now at the densely 
wooded hills to the left, stretching from Nemours to Bouron. 
And in the valley of the Loing, where the noises on the road 
came back echoed from the hill, he could hear the gallop of 
^his own horses and the cracking of his postillions’ whips. 

Could any one but a postmaster get out of patience with 
gazing at a field full of cattle, such as Paul Potter painted, 
under a sky worthy of Raphael, by a canal overhung with 
trees, like a picture by Hobbema? Any one who knows 
Nemours, knows that nature there is as beautiful as art, whose 
mission it is to spiritualize nature ; the landscape there has 
ideas, and suggests thoughts. 

Still, on seeing Minoret-Levrault, an artist would have left 
his place to sketch this country townsman ; he was so original 
by sheer force of being common. Combine all the charac- 
teristics of the brute and you get Caliban, who certainly is a 
great creation. Where matter predominates, sentiment ends. 
The postmaster, a living proof of this axiom, had one of 
those countenances in which the student finds it hard to dis- 
cern the soul through the violent purple hues of the coarsely 
developed flesh. His little gored blue cap, with a peak, fitted 
closely to a head so huge as to prove that Gall’s science of 
phrenology has not yet dealt with the exceptions to his rules. 
The shining gray hair, which formed a fringe to the cap, 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


3 


showed that white hairs may be the result of other causes 
than overworked brains or severe grief. His large ears were 
almost bursting round the edges from the fulness of too abun- 
dant blood, which seemed ready to spurt out after the 
smallest exertion. His complexion showed purple blotches 
under a brown pigment, the result of constant exposure to 
the sun. His gray eyes, restless and deep set, hidden under 
two black bushes of eyebrow, were like the eyes of the Kal- 
mucks seen in Paris in 1815 ; if they glistened nowand then, 
it could only be under the influence of a covetous idea. His 
nose, squat at the base, took a sudden turn up like the foot 
of a kettle. Thick lips harmonized with an almost disgusting 
double chin, rough with the stubble of a beard shaved scarcely 
twice a week, which rubbed a dirty necktie into a state of 
worn string; a very short neck, in rolls of fat, and puffy 
cheeks, completed this image of stupid strength, such as 
sculptors give to their caryatides. Minoret-Levrault was like 
one of those statues, with the difference, however, that they 
support something, while he had quite enough to do to 
support himself. 

You will meet with many an Atlas like him. The man’s 
torso was a huge block, a bull standing on his hind legs. 
Powerful arms terminated in thick, hard hands, broad and 
strong, apt at wielding the whip, the reins, and the pitchfork, 
hands which were no joke in the eyes of his postillions. The 
enormous stomach of this giant rested on legs as thick as the 
body of a full-grown man, and feet like an elephant’s. Rage 
was no doubt rare in this man, but when it broke out it would 
be terrible, apoplectic. Though he was violent and incapable 
of reflection, the man had done nothing to justify the sinister 
threats of his appearance. When any one trembled before 
the giant, his post-boys would say, “ Oh, he’s not a bad 
fellow! ” 

The “ Master” of Nemours, to make use of an abbrevia- 
tion common in many countries, wore a shooting jacket of 


4 


URSULE MIROUET. 


bottle-green velveteen, trousers of striped green duck, and a 
vast yellow mohair waistcoat. In the waistcoat pocket an 
enormous snuff-box was evident, outlined by a black ring. 
That a snub nose argues a big snuff-box is a rule almost with- 
out exception. 

Minoret-Levrault, as a son of the Revolution, and a spec- 
tator of the Empire, had never concerned himself with 
politics; as to his religious opinions, he had never set foot in 
a church but to be married ; as to his principles in domestic 
life, they were contained in the Civil Code. He thought 
everything permissible that was not forbidden or indictable 
by law. He had never read anything but the local newspaper 
and some manuals relating to his business. He was regarded 
as a skillful agriculturist, but his knowledge was purely em- 
pirical. 

In Minoret-Levrault, then, the mind did not give the lie 
to the body. He spoke rarely, and before delivering himself 
he always took a pinch of snuff to gain time to find, not ideas, 
but words. If he had been talkative, he would have seemed 
a failure. 

When you think that this sort of elephant, without a trunk 
and without intelligence, was called Minoret-Levrault, must 
you not recognize, with Sterne, the occult power of names, 
which sometimes mask and sometimes label the character of 
their owners? In spite of these conspicuous disadvantages, 
in thirty-six years, the Revolution helping, he had made a 
fortune of thirty thousand francs a year in meadow-land, 
arable land, and woods. 

Though Minoret, who had shares in the Nemours Messa- 
geries Company and an interest in the Gatinais Company at 
Paris, was still hard at work, it was not so much from habit 
as for the sake of his only son, for whom he wished to prepare 
handsome prospects. This son, who, in the peasants’ phrase- 
ology, had become a gentleman, had just ended his studies 
for the law, and on the reopening of the courts was to be 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


5 


sworn as a qualified attorney. Monsieur and Madame 
Minoret-Levrault — for behind the colossus a woman is evi- 
dent, a wife, without whom such a fortune would have been 
impossible — had left their son free to choose his career, as a 
notary at Paris, as public prosecutor in some country town, 
as receiver-general, stockbroker, or postmaster. What fancy 
might he not allow himself, to what profession might he not 
aspire, as the son of a man of whom it was said from Mont- 
argis to Essonne, “ Father Minoret does not know how much 
he has? ” 

This idea had received fresh confirmation when, four years 
since, after selling his inn, Minoret built himself a splendid 
house and stables, and removed the posting business from the 
High Street to the river-side. The new buildings had cost 
two hundred thousand francs, which gossip doubled for thirty 
miles round. The posting-stage at Nemours required a great 
number of horses ; it worked as far as Fontainebleau on the 
Paris side, and beyond the roads to Montargis and Montereau ; 
the relays were long, and the sandy soil about Montargis 
justified the imaginary third horse, which is always paid for 
and never seen. A man of Minoret’s build and of Minoret’s 
wealth, at the head of such a concern, might well be called 
without abuse of words the Master of Nemours. Though he 
never gave a thought to God or the devil, and was a practical 
materialist — as he was a practical agriculturist, a practical 
egoist, a practical miser — Minoret had hitherto enjoyed un- 
mixed happiness, if a merely material existence may be 
regarded as happy. On seeing the pad of flesh which covered 
the man’s top vertebrae and pressed on his occiput, and 
especially on hearing his shrill, thin voice, which contrasted 
ludicrously with his bull-neck, a physiologist would have 
understood at once why this great, coarse, burly countryman 
adored his only son, and perhaps why he had so long awaited 
his birth — as the name given to the child, Desire, sufficiently 
indicated. In short, if love, as betraying a rich physical 


6 


URSULE MIROUET. 


nature, is the promise of great things in a man, philosophers 
will understand the causes of Minoret’s failure. 

His wife, whom the son happily resembled, vied with his 
father in spoiling the boy. No child’s nature could hold out 
against such idolatry. And, indeed, Desire, who knew the 
extent of his power, was clever enough to draw on his mother’s 
savings-box and dip his hand in his father’s purse, making 
each of his fond parents believe that he had not applied to the 
other. Desire, who played at Nemours a far more grateful 
part than that of a prince in his father’s capital, had indulged 
all his fancies at Paris just as he did in his little native town, 
and had spent more than twelve thousand francs a year. But 
then, for this money, he had acquired ideas which would 
never have come into his head at Nemours ; he had cast his 
provincial skin, he had learned the power of money, and had 
seen that the legal profession was a means of rising in the 
world. During the last year he had spent ten thousand francs 
more by forming intimacies with artists, journalists, and their 
mistresses. 

A somewhat alarming confidential letter might have ac- 
counted, in case of need, for the postmaster’s anxious lookout, 
a letter in which his son asked his sanction for a marriage ; 
but Madame Minoret-Levrault, fully occupied in preparing a 
sumptuous meal in honor of the success and the return of the 
fully-fledged lawyer, had sent her husband out on the road, 
desiring him to ride forward if he saw no signs of the dili- 
gence. The diligence by which this only son was to arrive 
usually reached Nemours at about five in the morning, and it 
was now striking nine ! What could cause such a delay ? 
Had there been an upset ? Was Desire alive ? Had he even 
broken a leg ? 

Three volleys of cracking whips rattle out, rending the air 
like the report of firearms ; the red waistcoats of the post- 
boys are just in sight, ten horses neigh at once ! The master 
takes off his cap and waves it; and he is seen. .The best 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


7 


mounted of the postillions, who is returning with two dappled 
gray post-horses, touches up the beast he is riding, outstrip- 
ping five sturdy diligence horses, and the Minorets of the 
stable, three carriage horses, and comes up to the master. 

“ Have you seen the ‘ Dueler?’ ” 

On the high-roads all the coaches have names — fantastical 
enough : they are spoken of as the “ Caillard,” the “ Dueler ” 
(the diligence between Nemours and Paris), the “Grand- 
Bureau.” Every new company’s coach is the “ Rival.” At 
the time when the Lecomtes ran coaches, their vehicles were 
known as the “ Comtesses.” 

“The ‘ Caillard ’ did not overtake the ‘ Comtesse,’ but the 
‘ Grand-Bureau ’ caught her skirts, anyhow ! The ‘ Caillard ’ 
and the ‘Grand-Bureau ’ have done for the ‘ Francises ’ ” — the 
coaches of the Messageries Fran^aises or royal mails. If you 
see a post-boy going fit to split, and refusing a glass of wine, 
question the guard ; he will cock his nose and stare into space, 
and reply, “ The Rival is ahead ! ” “And we cannot even 
see her ! ” adds the postillion. “ The wretch ! he has not 
given his passengers time to eat ! ” “As if he had any ! ” 
retorts the guard. “Whip up Polignac ! ” All the worst 
horses are called Polignac. These are the standing jokes and 
subjects of conversation between the postillions and the guards 
on the top of the coaches. In France every profession has its 
own slang. 

“ Did you see inside the ‘ Dueler? ’ ” 

“Monsieur Desire?” says the postillion, interrupting his 
master. “ Why, you must have heard us ! Our whips gave 
due notice of her. We made sure you would be on the road.” 

“ Why is the diligence four hours late ? ” 

“The tire of one of the wheels came off between Essonne 
and Ponthierrv. But there was no accident ; Cabirolle for- 
tunately discovered it as we were going up the hill.” 

At this instant a woman in her Sunday best — for the bells 
of all the churches of Nemours were summoning the inhab- 


8 


URSULE MIROUET. 


itants to mid-day mass — a woman of about six-and-thirty, ad- 
dressed the postmaster. 

“Well, cousin,” said she, “you would not believe me! 
Our uncle is in the High Street with Ursule, and they are 
going to mass.” 

In spite of the license of modern romance in the matter of 
local coloring, it is impossible to carry realism so far as to 
repeat the horrible abuse, mingled with oaths, which this news, 
so undramatic as it would seem, brought from the wide mouth 
of Minoret-Levrault ; his thin voice became a hiss, and his 
face had the appearance which the country-folk ingeniously 
refer to as “ sunstroke.” 

“Are you certain?” he asked after his first explosion of 
rage. 

The postillions as they went by touched three hats to the 
master, who seemed neither to see nor hear them. Instead 
of waiting for his son, Minoret-Levrault returned up the High 
Street with hi* cousin. 

“ Did I not always tell you so?” she went on. “When 
Doctor Minoret has fallen into his dotage, that sanctimonious 
little slut will make a bigot of him ; and as those who rule 
the mind rule the purse, she will get all our money.” 

“But, Madame Massin,” said the postmaster, quite con- 
founded. 

“ Oh, yes ! ” cried Madame Massin, interrupting her cousin, 
“ you will say as Massin does: ‘ Is a girl of fifteen likely to 
invent and execute such a plot ? To make a man of eighty- 
three, who never set foot in a church excepting to be married, 
give up all his opinions ? A man who has such a horror of 
priests that he did not even go to the parish church with the 
child the day of her first communion. ’ But, I say, if Doctor 
Minoret has such a horror of priests, why, for the last fifteen 
years, has he spent almost every evening of the week with the 
Abb6 Chaperon ? The old hypocrite never fails to give Ursule 
twenty francs to pay for a taper when she presents the wafer 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


0 

for the mass. Why, do you not remember the gift XJrsule 
made to the church as a thank-offering to the cure for having 
prepared her for her first communion ? She spent all her 
money on it, and her godfather gave it back to her doubled. 
You men pay no heed to anything ! When I heard all these 
details : ‘ Put away your baskets,’ said I, ‘ the grapes are not 
for you ! ’ A rich uncle does not behave in that way to a 
little hussy he has picked out of the gutter unless he means 
something by it.” 

“Pooh ! cousin,” replied the postmaster, “ the good man 
is escorting her as far as the church by mere chance. It is a 
fine day, and he is going to take a walk.” 

“I tell you, cousin, our uncle has a prayer-book in his 
hand ; and he looks so smug ! However, you will see 1 ” 

“ They have been playing a very sly game,” observed the 
burly postmaster, “for old Bougival told me that there never 
was any religious discussion between the doctor and the Abbe 
Chaperon. Besides, the vicar of Nemours is the best man on 
earth ; he would give his last shirt to a beggar; he is incapa- 
ble of a mean action, and to filch an inheritance is a ” 

“ It is robbery ! ” said Madame Massin. 

“It is worse ! ” cried Minoret-Levrault, exasperated by his 
voluble cousin’s remark. 

“ I know,” she went on, “ that the Abb6 Chaperon, though 
he is a priest, is an honest man. But he is capable of any- 
thing for the poor. He must have undermined Uncle Min- 
oret, and the doctor has fallen into bigotry. We were easy 
in our minds, and now he is perverted. A man who never 
believed in anything, and who had principles ! Oh, we are 
all done for ! My husband is dreadfully upset.” 

Madame Massin, whose speeches were so many arrows that 
stung her stout cousin, made him walk as briskly as herself in 
spite of his size, to the great amazement of the people who 
were going to mass. She wanted to catch up with Uncle 
Minoret and show him to the postmaster. 


10 URSULE MIR O LET. 

On the Gatinais side of Nemours the town is commanded 
by a hill, along the base of which the river Loing flows, and 
the road runs to Montargis. The church, on which time has 
cast a rich mantle of gray, for it was certainly rebuilt in the 
fourteenth century by the Guises, in whose honor Nemours 
gave its name to a duchy and peerage, stands at the end of 
the town beyond a large archway, as in a frame. For build- 
ings, as for men, position is everything. Shaded by trees 
and shown to advantage by a neat little square, this lonely 
church has quite an imposing effect. As they came out on to 
the square, the postmaster could see his uncle giving his arm 
to the young girl they had called Ursule, each carrying a 
prayer-book, and just entering the church. The old man 
took off his hat in the porch, and his perfectly white head, 
like a summit covered with snow, shone in the soft gloom of 
the great doorway. 

“ Well, Minoret, what do you say to your uncle’s conver- 
sion ? ” cried the tax-receiver of Nemours, whose name was 
Cr£mi£re. 

“What do you expect me to say?” replied the postmaster, 
offering him a pinch of snuff. 

“Well answered, Father Levrault. You cannot say what 
you think, if a certain learned writer was correct in saying 
that a man must necessarily think his words before he can 
speak his thought,” mischievously exclaimed a young man 
who had just come up, and who played in Nemours the part 
of Mephistopheles in “Faust.” « 

This rascally fellow, named Goupil, was head clerk to Mon- 
sieur Cremiere-Dionis, the notary of the town. Notwith- 
standing the antecedents of an almost crapulous career, Dionis 
had taken Goupil into his office when absolute destitution 
hindered him from remaining any longer at Paris, where the 
clerk had spent all the money left him by his father, a well-to- 
do farmer, who meant him to become a notary. Only to see 
Goupil was enough to tell you that he had made haste to enjoy 


11 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 

life \ for, to procure himself pleasure, he must have paid 
dearly for it. Though very short, the clerk, at seven-and- 
twenty, had a form as burly as that of any man of forty. 
Short, thin legs, a broad face with a mottled, muddy skin, like 
the sky before a storm, and a bald forehead, gave emphasis to 
this strange figure. His face looked as if it belonged to a 
hunchback, whose hump was an internal deformity. A pecu- 
liarity of this sour, pale face confirmed the notion of this 
invisible malformation. His nose, hooked and twisted, as is 
often the case with hunchbacks, had a crossway slope from right 
to left, instead of dividing the face down the middle. His 
mouth, pinched at the corners — the sardonic mouth — was 
always eager for irony. His thin, reddish hair fell in dank 
locks, showing the head through here and there. His great 
hands and clumsy wrists, at the end of overlong arms, were 
like talons, and very seldom clean. Goupil wore shoes only 
fit to be thrown into the dust-heap, and rusty-black, spun-silk 
stockings ; his black coat and trousers, rubbed perfectly 
threadbare, and almost greasy with dirt ; his abject waistcoats, 
with buttons from which the mould had slipped out ; the old 
bandana he wore as a cravat — every part of his dress pro- 
claimed the cynical misery to which his passions condemned 
him. 

This aggregate of sinister details was completed by a pair 
of goat's eyes, the iris set in yellow rings, at once lascivious 
and cowardly. No man in Nemours was more feared or more 
respectfully treated than Goupil. Strong in pretensions which 
his ugliness allowed, he had the detestable wit that is peculiar 
to persons who take every liberty, and he made use of it to be 
revenged for the mortifications of his permanent* jealousy. 
He rhymed satirical couplets such as are sung at the Carnival, 
he got up farcical demonstrations, and himself wrote almost 
the whole of the local newspaper gossip. Dionis, a keen, 
false nature, and therefore a timid one, kept Goupil as much 
out of fear as on account of his intelligence and his thorough 


12 


UR SUL E MIROUET. 


knowledge of family interests in the neighborhood. But the 
master so little trusted the clerk that he managed his accounts 
himself, did not allow him to lodge at his house, and never 
employed him on any confidential or delicate business. 1 lie 
clerk flattered his master, never showing the resentment he 
felt at this conduct ; and he watched Madame Dionis with an 
eye to revenge. He had a quick intelligence, and worked 
well and easily. 

“ Oh you ! You are laughing already at our misfortunes,” 
said the postmaster to the clerk, who was rubbing his hands. 

As Goupil basely flattered every passion of Desire’s, who for 
the last five years had made him his companion, the postmaster 
treated him cavalierly enough, never suspecting what a horrible 
store of evil feeling was accumulating at the bottom of 
Goupil’s heart at each fresh thrust. The clerk having come 
to the conclusion that he, more than any one, needed money, 
and knowing himself to be superior to all the good townsfolk 
of Nemours, aimed at making a fortune, and counted on 
Desire’s friendship to procure for him one of the three good 
openings in the place — the registrarship of the law courts, the 
business of one of the ushers, or that of Dionis. So he 
patiently endured the postmaster’s hectoring and Madame 
Minoret-Levrault’s disdain, and played an ignominious part 
to oblige Desir6, who, for these two years past, had left him 
to console the Ariadnes he abandoned at the end of the vaca- 
tion. Thus, Goupil ate the crumbs of the suppers he had 
prepared. 

“ If I had been the old fool’s nephew, he should not have 
made God my co-heir,” retorted the clerk, with a hideous 
grin that showed his wide-set and threatening black teeth. 

At this moment Massin-Levrault, junior, the justice’s 
registrar, came up with his wife, and with him was Madame 
Cremiere, the tax-receiver’s wife. This man, one of the 
crudest natives of the little town, had a face like a Tartar, 
small, round eyes like sloes under a sloping forehead, crinkled 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


13 


hair, an oily skin, large flat ears, a mouth almost without 
lips, and a thin beard. His manners had the merciless 
smoothness of the usurer whose dealings are based on fixed 
principles. He spoke like a man who has lost his voice. To 
complete the picture, he made his wife and his eldest daughter 
write out the copies of verdicts. 

Madame Cremiere was a very -fat woman, doubtfully fair, 
with a thickly freckled complexion ; she wore her gowns too 
tight, was great friends with Madame Dionis, and passed as 
well informed because she read novels. This lady of finance 
of the lowest type, full of pretensions to elegance and culture, 
was awaiting her uncle’s fortune to assume “ a certain style,” 
to decorate her drawing-room, and “ receive ” her fellow- 
townsfolk ; for her husband refused to allow her clockwork 
lamps, lithographs, and the trifles she saw in the notary’s wife’s 
drawing-room. She was excessively afraid of Goupil, who 
was always on the watch to repeat her capsulingies * — this was 
her way of saying lapsus linguce. One day Madame Dionis 
said to her that she did not know what water to use for her 
teeth. 

“Try gum water,” said she. 

By this time most of old Doctor Minoret’s collateral rela- 
tions had assembled in the church square, and the importance 
of the event which had agitated them was so universally un- 
derstood, that the groups of peasants, men and women, 
armed with red umbrellas and clad in the bright hues which 
make them so picturesque on fete-days as they tramp the 
roads, all had their eyes turned on the doctor’s presumptive 
heirs. In those little towns, which hold a middle rank be- 
tween the larger villages and the great cities, people who do 
not attend mass linger in the square. They discuss business. 

At Nemours the hour of mass is also that of a weekly 
money-market, to which come the residents in the scattered 

* Madame Cr6mi£re’s “ capsulingies ” are impossible to translate; an 
equivalent is all that can be attempted. 


14 URSULE mirouet. 

houses from a mile and a half round. This accounts for the 
mutual understanding of the peasants as against the masters, 
on the price of produce in relation to labor. 

“ And how would you have hindered it ? ” said the master 
to Goupil. 

“ I would have made myself as indispensable to him as the 
air he breathes. But you did not know how to manage him 
to begin with. An inheritance needs as much looking after 
as a pretty woman, and for lack of care both may slip through 
your fingers. If my master’s wife were here, she would tell 
you how accurate the comparison is,” he added. 

“ But Monsieur Bongrand has just told me we need not be 
uneasy,” said the justice’s registrar. 

“Oh! there are several ways of saying that,” replied 
Goupil, with a laugh. “ I should have liked to hear your 
cunning justice say that ! Why, if there were nothing more to 
be done ; if I, like him — for lie lives at your uncle’s — knew that 
the game was up, I should say with him, ‘Don’t be at all 
uneasy.’ ” 

And as he spoke the words, Goupil smiled in such a comical 
way, and gave them so plain a meaning, that the inheritors at 
once suspected the registrar of having been taken in by the 
justice’s cunning. The receiver of taxes, a fat little man, as 
insignificant as a tax-collector must be, and as witless as a 
clever wife could wish, demolished his co-heir Massin with : 
“ Didn’t I tell you so ? ” 

As double-dealers always ascribe their own duplicity to 
others, Massin looked askance at the justice of the peace, who 
was at this moment standing near the church with a former 
client, the Marquis du Rouvre. 

“ If only I were sure of it ! ” said he. 

“ You could nullify the protection he extends to the Mar- 
quis du Rouvre, who is within the power of the law, and 
liable to imprisonment ; he is deluging him with advice at 
this moment,” said Goupil, insinuating an idea of revenge to 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


15 


the registrar. “ But draw it mild with your chief ; he is very 
wide awake ; he must have some influence over your uncle, 
and may yet be able to prevent his leaving everything to the 
church.” 

“Pooh! we shall not die of it,” said Minoret-Levrault, 
opening his huge snuff-box. 

“ You will not live by it either,” replied Goupil, making 
the two women shiver ; for they, more rapidly than their 
husbands, interpreted as privation the loss of the inherit- 
ance on which they had counted for comfort. “ But we will 
drown this little grievance in floods of champagne, in honor 
of Desire’s return, won’t w z, gros plre?" he added, tapping 
the colossus in the stomach, and thus inviting himself for fear 
of being forgotten. 

Before going any farther, the precise reader will perhaps be 
glad to have here a sort of preamble in the form of a pedi- 
gree, which indeed is very necessary to define the degrees of 
relationship in which the old man, so suddenly converted, 
stood to the three fathers of families or their wives. These 
intermarriages of kindred race in provincial life may be the 
subject of more than one instructive reflection. 

At Nemours there are not more than three or four nobie 
families, of no great rank or fame ; among them, at the time 
of our story, shone that of the Portendueres. These exclu- 
sive families visit the nobility who possess lands and chateaux 
in the neighboring country — the D’Aiglemonts, for instance, 
owners of the fine estate of Saint-Lange, and the Marquis du 
Rouvre, on whose property, eaten up with mortgages, the 
townsfolk kept a greedy eye. The nobility who live in the 
towns have no wealth. Madame de Portenduere’s whole 
estate consisted of a farm, yielding four thousand seven hun- 
dred francs a year, and her house in the town. In the oppo- 
site scale to this miniature Faubourg St. Germain are half 
a score of rich citizens, retired millers and tradespeople, in 


16 


URSULE MIROUET. 


short, a miniature middle class, below whom struggle the 
small shopkeepers, the laboring class, and the peasants. This 
middle class affords here, as in the Swiss cantons and other 
small communities, the curious phenomenon of the dispersal 
of a few families native to the soil, perhaps ancient Gaulish 
clans, settling on a district, pervading it, and making all the 
inhabitants cousins. At the time of Louis XL, the period 
when the third estate at last took the by-names they were 
known by as permanent surnames, some of which presently 
mingled with those of the feudal class, the citizens of Nemours 
were all Minoret, Massin, Levrault, or Cremiere. By Louis 
XIII. ’s time these four families had given rise to Massin- 
Cremiere, Levrault-Massin, Massin-Minoret, Minoret-Minoret, 
Cremiere-Levrault, Levrault-Minoret-Massin, Massin-Levrault, 
Minoret-Massin, Massin-Massin, and Cremiere-Massin ; all 
further diversified by “junior” and “eldest son;” or by 
Cremiere-Franqois, Levrault-Jacques, and Jean-Minoret, 
enough to madden a Father Anselme, if the populace ever 
needed a genealogist. 

The changes in this domestic kaleidoscope with four sep- 
arate elements were so complicated by births and marriages, 
that the pedigree of the citizens of Nemours would have 
puzzled even the compilers of the “Almanac de Gotha,” not- 
withstanding the atomic science with which they work out the 
zigzags of German alliances. For a long time the Minorets 
held the tanneries, the Cremieres were the millers, the Massins 
went into business, the Levraults remained farmers. 

Happily for the country, these four stocks struck out rather 
than round the trunk, or threw out suckers by the expatri- 
ation of sons who sought a living elsewhere : there are Min- 
orets, cutlers, at Melun, Levraults at Montargis, Massins at 
Orleans, and Cremieres who have grown rich at Paris. Very 
various are the destinies of these bees that have swarmed 
outside the native hive. Rich Massins employ laboring Mas- 
sins, just as there are German princes in the service of Austria 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


17 


or Prussia. In the same department may be seen a Minoret 
millionaire protected by a Minoret soldier with the same 
blood in their veins ; but having only their names in common, 
these four shuttles had unceasingly woven a human web, of 
which each piece turned out a gown or a clout, the finest 
lawn or the coarsest lining. The same blood throbbed in 
their head, feet, or heart, in toiling hands, damaged lungs, or 
a brow big with genius. The heads of the clan faithfully clung 
to the little town where the ties of relationship could be re- 
laxed or tightened, as the results of this community of names 
might dictate. 

In every country, with a change of names, you will find 
the same fact ; but bereft of the poetry with which feudality 
had invested it, and which Sir Walter Scott has reproduced 
with so much talent. 

Look a little higher, and study humanity in history. All 
the noble families of the eleventh century, now almost all 
extinct excepting the royal race of Capet, must have co-oper- 
ated towards the birth of a Rohan, a Montmorency, a 
Bauffremont, a Mortemart of the present day ; at last, all 
would coexist in the blood of the humblest man of really 
gentle birth. In other words, every citizen is cousin to other 
citizens, every noble is cousin to other nobles. As we are told 
in the sublime page of Biblical genealogy, in a thousand 
years the three families of Shem, Ham, and Japhet could 
people the whole earth. A family can become a nation ; and, 
unfortunately, a nation may become one single family. To 
prove this we have only to apply to a family pedigree — in 
which the ancestors multiply backwards in geometrical pro- 
gression — the sum worked out by the sage who invented the 
frame of chess. He claimed, as his reward from the Persian 
king, an ear of corn for the first square on the board, two for 
the second, and so on, doubling the number every time, and 
proved that the whole kingdom could not pay it. This net- 
work of the nobility entangled in the network of the middle 
2 


18 


URSULE MIROUET. 


class, this antagonism of blood — the one class protected by 
rigid traditions, the other by the active endurance of labor 
and the craft of trade instincts — brought about the Revo- 
lution of 1789. The two strains, almost united, are to be 
seen to-day face to face with collaterals bereft of their inher- 
itance. What will they do? Our political future is big with 
the reply. 

The family of the man who, in Louis XV. ’s time, was the 
representative Minoret, was so large, that one of the five — • 
the very Minoret whose coming to church was making such 
a sensation — went to seek his fortune in Paris, and appeared 
in his native town only at long intervals, whither he came, no 
doubt, to acquire his share of the inheritance at the death of 
his grandparents. After suffering a great deal, as all young men 
must who are gifted with a strong will and desire a place in 
the brilliant world of Paris, this son of the Minorets made a 
career more splendid perhaps than he had dreamed of at the 
beginning ; for he devoted himself to medicine, one of the 
professions in which both talent and good-luck are needed, 
and good-luck even more than talent. Supported by Dupont 
(of Nemours), brought by a happy chance into contact with 
the Abbe Morellet (whom Voltaire nicknamed Mords les ), 
and patronized by the encyclopedists, Doctor Minoret at- 
tached himself with fanatical devotion to the great physician 
Bordeu, Diderot's friend. D’Alembert, Helvetius, Baron 
d’Holbach, and Grimm, to whom he was a mere boy, ended, 
no doubt, like Bordeu, by taking an interest in Minoret, who 
in 1777 had a fine connection among the deists, encyclope- 
dists, sensualists, materialists — call them as you will — the 
wealthy philosophers of that day. Though he was very little 
of a quack, he invented a famous remedy, Lelievre’s balsam, 
which was cried up in the Mercure dc France , and which was 
permanently advertised on the last page of that paper, the 
encyclopedists’ organ. The apothecary Lelievre, a clever 
man of business, discerned a success where Dr. Minoret had 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


19 


seen nothing more than a preparation to be included in the 
pharmacopoeia; he honestly divided the profits with the 
doctor, who was Rouelle’s pupil in chemistry, as he was 
Bordeu’s in medicine. It would have needed less to make 
him a materialist. 

In 1778, when Rousseau’s “ Nouvelle H^lo'ise ” was the 
rage, and men sometimes married for love, he married the 
daughter of Valentin Mirouet, the famous harpsichord player, 
herself a fine musician, but weakly and delicate, who died 
during the Revolution. Minoret was intimate with Robes- 
pierre, to whom he had once caused a gold medal to be 
awarded for a dissertation on these questions: “What is the 
origin of the opinion by which part of the shame attaching 
to the disgraceful punishment of a guilty man is reflected on 
all his family? Is this opinion generally useful or mischiev- 
ous? And supposing it to be mischievous, by what means 
can we avert the disastrous results?’’ The Academy of Arts 
and Sciences at Metz, to which Minoret belonged, must still 
have the original copy of this discourse. Although, thanks 
to this friendship, the doctor’s wife had nothing to fear, she 
lived in such dread of being sent to the scaffold that this 
invincible terror aggravated an aneurism due to a too sensitive 
nature. In spite of all the precautions a man could take who 
idolized his wife, Ursule met the truck full of condemned 
victims, and among them, as it happened, Madame Roland. 
The spectacle caused her death. Minoret, who had spoiled 
his Ursule, and refused her nothing, so that she had led a life 
of extravagant luxury, at her death found himself almost a 
poor man. Robespierre appointed him first physician to a 
hospital. 

Although the name of Minoret had been somewhat famous 
during the vehement discussions to which mesmerism had given 
rise, a fame which had recalled him now and then to his rela- 
tions’ memory, the Revolution was so powerful a solvent, and 
broke up so many family connections, that in 1813 no one at 


20 


URSULE M1ROUET. 


Nemours knew even of Doctor Minoret’s existence, when an 
unexpected meeting suggested to him the idea of returning, 
as hares do, to die in his form. 

In traveling through France, where the eye is so soon 
fatigued by the monotony of the wide plains, who has not 
known the delightful sensation of discerning, from the top of 
a hill where the road turns or descends, and where he ex- 
pected to see a dull landscape, a green valley watered by a 
stream, and a little town sheltered under a cliff, like a hive in 
the hollow of an old willow-tree? As he hears the postillion’s 
cry of “Come up! ” while he walks at his horse’s side, the 
traveler shakes off sleep, and admires as a dream within a 
dream some lovely scene which is to the stranger what a fine 
passage in a book is to the reader — a brilliant idea of nature. 
This is the effect produced by the sudden view of Nemours 
on the road from Burgundy. It is seen from the height in an 
amphitheatre of naked rocks, gray, white and black, like those 
which are scattered throughout the forest of Fontainebleau ; 
and from among them shoot up solitary trees, standing out 
against the sky, and giving a rural aspect to this sort of 
tumble-down rampart. This is the end of the long wooded 
slope which rises from Nemours to Bouron, sheltering the 
road on one side. At the foot of these cliffs spreads a meadow- 
land, through which the Loing flows, in level pools ending 
in little waterfalls. This exquisite tract of country, cut 
through by the Montargis road, is like an elaborate opera 
scene, the effects seem so carefully worked up, and brought 
out in strong contrasts. 

One morning the doctor, who had been sent for by a rich in- 
valid in Burgundy, and who was hastening back to Paris, not 
having mentioned at the last change of horses which road he 
wished to take, was unwittingly brought through Nemours, 
and between two naps saw once more the landscape familiar 
to his childhood. The doctor had by this time lost many of 
his old friends. The disciple of the Encyclopedia had lived 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


21 


to see La Harpe a convert, had buried Lebrun-Pindare, and 
Marie-Joseph de Chenier, and Morellet, and Madame Hel- 
vetius. Pie had seen the quasi overthrow of Voltaire under the 
attacks of Geoffroy, Freron’s successor. Hence he was think- 
ing of retiring. And when the post-chaise stopped at the top 
of the High Street of Nemours, his good feeling prompted 
him to inquire after his family. Minoret-Levrault himself 
came out to see the doctor, who recognized in the postmaster 
his eldest brother’s son. This nephew introduced as his 
wife the only daughter of old Levrault-Cremiere, who, twelve 
years ago, had left her the posting business and the hand- 
somest inn in Nemours. 

“Well, nephew,” said the doctor, “and have I any other 
heirs ? ” 

“ My Aunt Minoret, your sister, married a Massin-Massin.” 

“Yes, the intendant at Saint-Lange.” 

“She died a widow, leaving one daughter, who has lately 
married a Cremiere-Cremiere, a very nice fellow, who so far 
has no appointment.” 

“To be sure; she is my own niece. Now, as my brother 
at sea died unmarried, and Captain Minoret was killed at 
Monte-Legino, and I am here, that is an end of my father’s 
family. Have I any relations on my mother’s side ? She 
was a Jean-Massin-Levrault.” 

“ Of the Jean-Massin-Levraults,” replied Minoret-Levrault, 
“ only one daughter survived, who married Monsieur Cre- 
miere-Levrault-Dionis, a dealer in corn and forage, who died 
on the scaffold. His wife died of a broken heart, and quite 
ruined, leaving one girl, married to a Levrault-Minoret, a 
farmer at Montereau, who is doing well ; and their daughter 
has just married a Massin-Levrault, a notary’s clerk at Mon- 
targis, where his father is a locksmith.” 

“ So I have no lack of inheritors,” said the doctor cheerfully, 
and he determined to walk round Nemours in his nephew’s 
company. 


22 


URSULE MIROUET. 


The Loing meanders through the town, fringed with ter- 
raced gardens and neat houses that look as if happiness should 
inhabit there rather than elsewhere. When the doctor turned 
out of the High Street into the Rue des Bourgeois, Minoret- 
Levrault pointed out the property of Monsieur Levrault, a 
rich ironmaster at Paris, who, he said, was lately dead. 

“There, uncle,” said he, “ is a pretty house to be sold, 
with a beautiful garden down to the river.” 

“ Let us go in,” said the doctor, seeing a house at the far- 
ther side of a paved courtyard, shut in by the walls of houses 
on either side, hidden by clumps of trees and climbing plants. 

“ It is built on cellars,” said the doctor as he went in, up 
a high outside stairway, decorated with blue and white earthen- 
ware pots in which the geraniums were still in bloom. The 
house, like most provincial residences, was pierced by a pas- 
sage down the middle, leading from the courtyard to the gar- 
den ; to the right was a single sitting-room with four windows, 
two to the yard, and two to the garden ; but Levrault-LevrauW 
had turned one of these into an entrance to a long conserva- 
tory built of brick, leading from the room to the river, where 
it ended in a hideous Chinese summer-house. 

“Very good ! ” said the doctor. “By roofing and floor- 
ing this conservatory I could make a place for my books, and 
turn that amazing piece of architecture into a pretty little 
study.” 

On the other side of the passage, looking on to the garden, 
was a dining-room, decorated in imitation of lacquer, with a 
black background and green and gold flowers ; this was 
divided from the kitchen by the staircase. A little pantry 
behind the lower flight led from the dining-room to the 
kitchen, which had barred windows looking out on the court- 
yard. On the first floor were two sets of rooms, and above 
that wainscoted attics, quite habitable. After a brief inspec- 
tion of this house, which was covered with green vine-trellis 
from top to bottom, on the courtyard front as well as on the 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


23 


garden side, with a terrace to the river edged with earthen- 
ware flower-vases, the doctor remarked — 

“ Levrault-Levrault must have spent a good deal here ! ” 

“Oh, his weight in gold!” replied Minoret-Levrault. 
“He had a passion for flowers — such folly! ‘What profit 
do they bring? ’ as my wif; says. As you see, a painter came 
from Paris to paint his corridor with flowers in fresco. He 
put in whole plate mirrcrs everywhere. The ceilings were 
done up with cornices tnat cost six francs a foot. In the 
dining-room the floor is of the finest inlay — such folly ! The 
house is not worth a penny the more for it.” 

“ Well, nephew, buy it for me. Let me know when it is 
settled ; here is my address. The rest my lawyer will attend 
to. Who lives opposite? ” he asked as they went out into the 
street. 

“Some emigres , ” said the postmaster; “a Chevalier de 
Portenduere.” 

When the house was bought, the distinguished physician, 
instead of coming to live in it, wrote orders to his nephew to 
let it. Levrault’s Folly was taken by the notary of Nemours, 
who sold his business to Dionis his head clerk, and who died 
two years after, leaving the doctor burthened with a house to 
let just at the time when Napoleon’s fate was being sealed in 
the neighborhood. The doctor’s heirs, somewhat taken in, 
had at first supposed his wish to return to be a rich man’s 
whim, and were in despair when, as they imagined, he had 
ties in Paris which kept him there, and would rob them of 
his leavings. However, Minoret-Levrault’s wife seized this 
opportunity of writing to the doctor. The old man replied 
that as soon as peace should be signed, the roads cleared of 
soldiers, and communications free once more, he meant to 
live at Nemours. He made his appearance there with two of 
his clients, the architect to the hospital, and an upholsterer 
who undertook the repairs, the rearrangement of the rooms, 
and the removal of his furniture. Madame Minoret-Levrault 


24 


URSULE MIROUET. 


proposed to him as caretaker the cook of the departed notary, 
and this he agreed to. 

When the heirs learned that their uncle, or great-uncle 
Minoret, was really going to live at Nemours, their families 
were seized by an absorbing but almost legitimate curiosity, 
in spite of the political events which just then more especially 
agitated the district of the Gatinais and Brie. Was their 
uncle rich? Was he economical or extravagant? Would he 
leave a fine fortune or nothing at all ? Had he invested in 
annuities? All this they at last came to know, but with in- 
finite difficulty, and by means of much backstairs spying. 

After the death of his wife Ursule Mirouet, from 1789 to 
1813, the doctor, who in 1805 had been appointed consulting 
physician to the Emperor, must have made a great deal of 
money, but no one knew how much ; he lived very simply, 
with no expenses beyond a carriage by the year, and a splen- 
did apartment ; he never entertained, and almost always dined 
out. His housekeeper, furious at not being asked to go with 
him to Nemours, told Zelie Levrault, the postmaster’s wife, 
that to her knowledge he had fourteen thousand francs a year 
in consols. Now, after practicing for twenty years in a pro- 
fession which such appointments as head physician to a hos- 
pital, as physician to the Emperor, and as member of the 
institute could not fail to have made lucrative, these fourteen 
thousand francs a year as dividends on repeated investments 
argued no more than a hundred and sixty thousand francs in 
savings ! And to have laid by no more than eight thousand 
francs a year, the doctor must have had many vices or virtues 
to indulge. Still, neither the housekeeper, nor Zelie, nor any 
one else could divine the secret of so small a fortune. Min- 
oret, who was greatly regretted in his own neighborhood, was 
one of the most liberal benefactors in Paris, and, like Larrey, 
kept his acts of benevolence a profound secret. 

So it was with the liveliest satisfaction that his heirs watched 
the arrival of their uncle’s handsome furniture and extensive 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


25 


library, and knew him to be an officer of the Legion of 
Honor, and made Chevalier of the Order of Saint-Michael by 
the King, in consequence, perhaps, of his retirement, which 
made way for some favorite. But the architect, the painters, 
and the upholsterers had finished everything in the most com- 
fortable fashion, and still the doctor came not. Madame Min- 
OI ct-Levrault, who watched the upholsterer and the architect as 
though her own property were at stake, discovered, through 
the inadvertence of a young man sent to put the books in 
order, that the doctor had in his care an orphan named 
Ursule. This news caused strange dismay in the town of 
Nemours. At last the old man came home in about the 
middle of January, 1815, and settled down without any fuss, 
bringing with him a little girl of ten months and her nurse. 

“ Ursule cannot be his daughter; he is seventy-one years 
old ! ” cried the alarmed expectants. 

“ Whoever she may be, she will give us plenty of bother,” 
said Madame Massin. 

The doctor’s reception of his grandniece on the mother’s 
side was cold enough ; her husband had just bought the place 
of registrar to the justice of the peace, and they were the first 
to venture on any allusion to the difficulties of their position. 
Massin and his wife were not rich. Massin’s father, an iron- 
worker at Montargis, had been obliged to compound with his 
creditors, and worked now, at the age of sixty-seven, as hard 
as a young man ; he would have nothing to leave. Madame 
Massin’s father, Levrault-Minoret, had lately died at Mon- 
tereau of grief at the results of the fighting — his farmhouse 
burnt down, his fields destroyed, and his cattle killed and eaten. 

“ We shall get nothing out of your great-uncle,” said 
Massin to his wife, who was expecting her second baby. 

But the doctor secretly gave them ten thousand francs, with 
which the registrar, as the friend of the notary and of the 
usher of Nemours, had begun money-lending; and he made 
the peasants pay such usurious interest that, at this later day, 


26 UR SUL E MIROUET. 

Goupil knew him to possess about eighty thousand francs of 
unconfessed capital. 

As to his other niece, the doctor, by his influence in Paris, 
procured the post of receiver of public moneys at Nemours 
for Cremiere, and advanced the necessary security. Though 
Minoret-Levrault wanted nothing, Zelie, very jealous of her 
uncle’s liberality to his two nieces, came to see him with her 
son, then ten years old, whom she was about to send to school 
in Paris, where, as she said, education was very costly. As 
physician to Monsieur de Fontanes, the doctor obtained a 
half-scholarship at the College of Louis le Grand for his 
grand-nephew, who was placed in the fourth class. 

Cremiere, Massin, and Minoret-Levrault, all three very 
common men, were condemned beyond appeal by the doctor 
during the first two or three months, while they were trying 
to circumvent their future prospects rather than himself. 
Persons who act by instinct have this disadvantage as com- 
pared with those who have ideas — they are more easily seen 
through. The inspirations of instinct are too elementary, 
and appeal too directly to the eye, not to be detected at once; 
while to penetrate ideas, the devices of the mind, equal intel- 
ligence is needed on both sides. 

Having thus purchased the gratitude of his heirs, and to 
some extent stopped their mouths, the wily doctor alleged his 
occupations, his habits, and the care he gave to little Ursule, 
so as not to receive their visits, without, however, shutting his 
door to them : “ He liked to dine alone ; he went to bed 
and rose late ; he had come back to his native place to enjoy 
repose and solitude.” These whims in an old man seemed 
natural enough, and his expectant heirs were satisfied to pay 
him a weekly visit on Sundays between one and four, to which 
he vainly tried to put a stop by saying — 

u Only come to see me when you want me.” 

The doctor, though he did not refuse his advice in serious 
pases, especially among the poor, would not become physician 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


27 


to the little asylum at Nemours, and declared that he would 
no longer practice. 

“ I have killed enough people ! ” said he, laughing, to the 
Cure Chaperon, who, knowing his benevolence, pleaded for 
the poor. 

“ He is quite an oddity.” 

This verdict on Doctor Minoret was the harmless revenge 
of wounded vanity, for the physician formed a little society 
for himself of persons who deserve to be contrasted with the 
heirs. Now, those of the town magnates who thought them- 
selves worthy to swell the court circle of a man wearing the 
black ribbon of Saint Michael, nourished a ferment of jealousy 
against the doctor and his privileged friends which, unhappily, 
was not impotent. 

By a singularity which can only be explained by the saying 
that “extremes meet,” the materialist doctor and the priest 
of Nemours very soon were friends. The old man was very 
fond of backgammon, the favorite game of the clergy, and 
the abbe was a match for the physician. This game thus 
became the first bond between them. Then Minoret was 
charitable, and the cure of Nemours was the Fenelon of the 
Gatinais. They were both men of varied information ; thus, 
in all Nemours, the man of God was the only man who could 
understand the atheist. In order to discuss any matter, 
two men must understand each other to begin with. What 
pleasure is there in saying sharp things to any one who does 
not feel them? The doctor and the priest had too much 
good taste, and had seen too much good company, not to 
observe its rules ; they could therefore carry on the little war- 
fare that is so necessary to conversation. Each hated the 
other's opinions, but they esteemed each other’s character. 
If such contrasts and such sympathies are not the essential 
elements of intimacy, must we not despair of society, since, 
especially in France, some antagonism is indispensable to it? 
Contrariety of characters, not antagonism of opinions, is what 

O 


28 


URSULE MIROUET. 


gives rise to antipathies. So the Abbe Chaperon was the 
doctor’s first friend at Nemours, and this friendship endured 
unfalteringly to the last. 

This priest, now sixty years of age, had been cure of 
Nemours ever since the re-establishment of Catholic worship. 
He had refused promotion to be vicar-general of his diocese 
out of attachment to his flock. If those who were indifferent 
to religion thought the better of him for it, the faithful loved 
him all the more. Thus venerated by his flock, and esteemed 
by the community, the cure did good without inquiring too 
closely as to the religious views of those who were unfor- 
tunate. His own dwelling, scarcely supplied with furniture 
enough for the strictest necessities of life, was as cold and 
bare as a miser’s hovel. Avarice and charity betray them- 
selves by similar results ; does not charity lay up in heaven 
the treasure that the miser hoards on earth? The Abbe 
Chaperon took his servant to task for every expense, more 
severely than Gobseck ever scolded his — if, indeed, that 
notorious Jew ever had a servant. The good priest often 
sold his silver shoe-buckles and breeches-buckles to give the 
money to some poor wretch he had found destitute. On see- 
ing him come out of church with the tongues of his knee- 
straps pulled through the buttonholes, the devout ladies of the 
town would trot off to look for the cure’s buckles at the one 
jeweler’s and watchmaker’s shop in Nemours, and reproach 
their pastor as they restored them to him. He never bought 
himself linen or clothes, and wore them till they were drop- 
ping to pieces. His underclothing, thick with darns, fretted 
his skin like a hair-shirt. Then Madame de Portenduere, or 
some other good soul, plotted with his houskeeper to replace 
his old shirts or cloth clothes by new ones while he slept ; 
and the priest did not always immediately perceive the ex- 
change. He dined off pewter, with iron forks and spoons ; 
when, on great occasions, he had to receive his subordinate 
clergy and other cures, a duty that falls on the head of a dis- 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


29 


trict, he borrowed silver and table-linen from his friend the 
atheist. 

“ My plate is working out its salvation,” the doctor would 
say. 

His good deeds, which were sooner or later found out, and 
which he always reinforced with spiritual comfort, were 
carried out with sublime simplicity. And such a life was all 
the more meritorious because the abbe was full of erudition, 
as vast as it was various, and a man of superior abilities. In 
him refinement and elegance, the inseparable attributes of 
simplicity, added charm to elocution worthy of a prelate. 
His manners, his character, and his conduct gave to his 
society the exquisite flavor of all that is at once candid and 
subtle in a lofty intellect. Enjoying pleasantry, in a draw- 
ing-room he was never the priest. Until Doctor Minoret’s 
arrival, this worthy man left his light under a bushel without 
a regret ; but he no doubt liked him the better for calling it 
into play. 

Possessed of a fairly good library and two thousand francs 
a year when he came to Nemours, in 1829, the cure had noth- 
ing left but the income from his church, and that he gave 
away almost entirely year by year. A man of good judgment 
in delicate affairs or in misfortune, more than one of those 
who never went to church in search of consolation went to 
the priest’s house in quest of advice. An anecdote will suf- 
fice to complete this portrait of a character. Certain pea- 
sants, seldom it is true, but bad folks at any rate, said they 
were in danger of imprisonment for debt, or had themselves 
sued falsely, to stimulate the abbe’s beneficence. They de- 
ceived their wives ; and the women, seeing themselves threat- 
ened with eviction and their cows seized, by their innocent 
tears deceived the poor cure, who would find the seven or 
eight hundred francs demanded, which the peasants would 
spend on a little plot of ground. When some pious persons, 
church- wardens, pointed out the fraud, begging the cure to 


30 UR SUL E MIR O UE T. 

consult them for the future, that he might not be the victim 
of greed, he replied — 

“ Perhaps those men would have committed some crime to 
get their acre of land, and is it not a form of good to hinder 
evil?” 

The reader may perhaps find pleasure in this sketch of a 
figure, remarkable because science and literature had entered 
that heart and that capable brain without corrupting them in 
any way. 

At sixty years of age the Abbe Chaperon’s hair was per- 
fectly white, so keenly was he alive to the sufferings of others, 
and so deeply had the events of the Revolution affected him. 
Twice imprisoned for having twice refused to take certain 
oaths, he had twice (to use his own expression) said his In 
manus. He was of middle height, neither stout nor thin. 
His face, deeply furrowed, hollow-cheeked, and colorless, 
attracted the eye at once by the perfect calm of the lines and 
the purity of its outline, which looked as if fringed with 
light. There is a mysterious kind of radiance from the face 
of a perfectly chaste man. Brown eyes, with bright pupils, 
gave life to irregular features, under a powerful forehead. 
His gaze exercised a dominion that may be explained by its 
sweetness, which did not exclude strength. The arches of 
his brows were like deep vaults, shadowed by thick gray eye- 
brows, which frightened no one. As he had lost many teeth, 
his mouth was shapeless, and his cheeks were hollow; but this 
ruin was not without charm, and his kindly wrinkles seemed 
always to be smiling at you. 

He walked with difficulty, having very tender feet, without 
being gouty; so in all weathers he wore soft calf-skin shoes. 
He thought trousers unsuitable to a priest, and always ap- 
peared in stout, black, worsted stockings, knitted by his 
housekeeper, and black cloth knee-breeches. He did not go 
out in his priest’s gown, but in a brown overcoat and the 
three-cornered hat he had always bravely worn, even in the 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


31 


worst times. This fine and noble old man, whose face was 
always beautified by the serenity of a blameless soul, was 
destined to have so great an influence on men and things in 
this narrative that it was necessary to go to the sources of his 
authority. 

Minoret took in three papers — one liberal, one ministerial, 
and one ultra — some periodical magazines and scientific 
journals, of which the accumulation swelled his library. 
These journals, the encyclopedist, and his books were an 
attraction to a retired captain of the Royal Swedish Regiment, 
Monsieur de Jordy, a gentleman, a Yoltairean, and an old 
bachelor, who lived on sixteen hundred francs a year, partly 
pension and partly an annuity. After reading the papers for 
some days, through the intervention of the cure, M. de Jordy 
thought it becoming to call and thank the doctor. From his 
very first visit the old captain, formerly a professor in the 
military college, won the doctor’s good graces, and the visit 
was promptly returned. 

Monsieur de Jordy, a lean, dry little man, but tormented 
by blood to the head, though he had a very pale face, was 
striking-looking by reason of a fine forehead, like Charles 
XII., over which his hair was cropped short like that of the 
soldier-king. His blue eyes, which would make one think 
“ Love has passed that way,” though they were deeply sad, 
were interesting at first sight, for their gaze betrayed remem- 
brance ; but on this point he kept his own secret so com- 
pletely that his old friends never detected him in any allusion 
to his past life, nor ever heard one of the exclamations which 
are sometimes called forth by a similarity in misfortune. He 
hid the painful mystery of his past under philosophical gaiety ; 
but when he thought himself alone, his movements, weighted 
by a slowness evidently deliberate rather than senile, bore 
witness to an ever-present painful thought. The abbe, in- 
deed, had called him “The Christian without knowing it.” 

Always wearing a blue cloth suit, his somewhat stiff de- 


32 


URSULE MIROUET. 

meanor and his style of dress betrayed old habits of military 
discipline. His voice, soft and musical, spoke to the soul. 
His fine hands, and the shape of his face, recalling that of 
the Comte d’ Artois, by showing how handsome he must have 
been in his youth, made the mystery of his life even more 
impenetrable. It was impossible not to wonder what was the 
disaster that had stricken a man so handsome, with courage, 
grace, learning, and all the most delightful qualities of heait 
which had formerly been united in his person. Monsieur de 
Jordy always shuddered at the name of Robespierre. He 
used a great deal of snuff, but, strange to say, he gave it up 
for little Ursule, who at first showed a dislike to him in con- 
sequence of this habit. Whenever he saw the child, the 
captain would gaze at her with lingering, almost passionate 
looks. He was so devoted to her games, and took so much 
interest in her, that this affection drew still tighter his tie to 
the doctor, who, on his part, never dared say to the old 
bachelor — 

“ Have you, too, lost children ? ” 

There are beings, good and patient as he was, who go 
through life with a bitter memory in their hearts, and a smile, 
at once tender and sorrowful, on their lips, bearing in them 
the answer to the riddle, but never allowing it to be guessed 
— out of pride, or scorn, or perhaps revenge — having none 
but God to trust in or to comfort them. At Nemours, whither, 
like the doctor, he had come to die in peace, Monsieur de 
Jordy visited nobody but the cure, who was always at the 
service of his parishioners, and Madame de Portenduere, who 
went to bed at nine o’clock. Thus he, weary of the struggle, 
had at last taken to going to bed early too, notwithstanding 
the thorns that stuffed his pillow. Thus it was a happy chance 
for the doctor, as well as for the captain, to meet a man who 
had known the same society, who spoke the same language, 
with whom he could exchange ideas, and who went to bed 
late. When once Monsieur de Jordy, the Abbe Chaperon, 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


33 


and Minoret had spent an evening together, they found it so 
pleasant that the priest and the soldier came in every evening 
at nine o’clock, when, little Ursule being in bed, the old man 
was free. And they all three sat talking till midnight, or one 
o’clock. 

Before long the trio became a quartette. Another man, 
who knew life well, and who had acquired in his profession 
that large-mindedness, learning, accumulated observation, 
shrewdness, and power of conversation which the soldier, the 
physician, and the priest had gained in dealing with souls, 
with diseases, and with teaching — the judge of the district, 
Monsieur Bongrand — got wind of the pleasures of these even- 
ings, and made himself acquainted with the doctor. 

Before being appointed a justice at Nemours, Monsieur Bon- 
grand had for ten years been attorney at Melun, where he 
himself had pleaded in court, as is usual (in France) in towns 
where there is no bar. At the age of forty-five he found 
himself a widower ; but feeling too active to do nothing, he 
had applied for the appointment as justice of the peace at 
Nemours, which had fallen vacant some months before the 
doctor’s arrival. The keeper of the seals is always glad to 
find a practical lawyer, and particularly a well-to-do man, to 
hold these important posts. Monsieur Bongrand lived very 
simply at Nemours on his salary of fifteen hundred francs, and 
could thus devote the rest of his income to his son, who was 
studying for the bar at Paris, and at the same time working 
up legal procedure under Derville, the famous attorney. 

The elder Bongrand was a good deal like a retired brigadier; 
his was a face, not naturally pale, but washed out, where busi- 
ness, disappointment, and disgust had left their marks; it was 
wrinkled by much thought, and also by the pinched look of 
a man who is constantly forced not to say all he thinks; but 
it was often illuminated by the smiles peculiar to men who, by 
turns, believe everything or believe nothing, who are accus- 
tomed to see and hear everything without surprise, to sound 
3 


34 


URSULE MIROUET. 


the depths which self-interest reveals at the bottom of men’s 
hearts. Under his hair, which was faded rather than gray, 
and brushed in smooth waves on his head, rose a sagacious 
brow, its yellow tint harmonizing with that of his thin locks. 
His face, being rather short, gave him some resemblance to a 
fox, all the more so because his nose was short and sharp. 
As he spoke, his wide mouth, like that of all great talkers, 
sputtered out a spray of white foam-stars, which made his 
conversation so showery that Goupil used to say, maliciously : 
“You want an umbrella while you listen to him,” or, “The 
justice of the peace rains decisions.” 

His eyes seemed keen behind his spectacles, but if he took 
them off his expression was dulled, and he looked stupid. 
Though lively, and even jovial, by his manner he gave him- 
self rather too much the airs of a man of importance. His 
hands were almost always in his trousers’ pockets, and he only 
took them out to settle his spectacles on his nose with a sort of 
mocking gesture, preliminary to some acute remark or clinch- 
ing argument. These movements, with his loquacity and his 
innocent pretentiousness, betrayed the country lawyer; but 
such slight defects were merely superficial ; he made up for 
them by an acquired geniality, which an exact moralist might 
define as the indulgence inherent in superiority. And if he 
had somewhat the look of a fox, he was also supposed to be 
extremely wily, without being dishonest. His cunning was 
the exercise of perspicacity. Do we not call folks cunning 
who can foresee results, and avoid the snares laid for them ? 
The lawyer was fond of whist, a game which the doctor and 
the captain played, and which the priest soon learned to play 
with equal proficiency. 

This little party created an oasis for themselves in Minoret’s 
drawing-room. The Nemours town doctor, who was not 
deficient in education or manners, and who respected Minoret 
as an ornament to the profession, was also admitted; but' his 
business and fatigues, which compelled him to go to bed e-udy 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


35 


that he might rise betimes, hindered him from being so regu- 
lar a visitor as the doctor’s three friends were. 

The meetings of these five superior men, who alone in all 
the town had enough general culture to understand each other, 
accounts for Minoret’s aversion for his heirs; though he 
might have to leave them his fortune, he could not admit 
them to his society. Whether the postmaster, the registrar, 
and the receiver understood this distinction, or were reassured 
by their uncle’s loyal nature and benefactions, they ceased at 
any rate to call on him, to his very great satisfaction. 

The four old players of whist and backgammon had, within 
seven or eight months of the doctor’s settling at Nemours, 
formed a compact and exclusive little circle, which came to 
each of them as a sort of autumnal brotherhood, quite un- 
looked for, and therefore all the sweeter and more enjoyable. 
This family party of choice spirits found in Ursule a child 
whom each could adopt after his manner : the priest thought 
of her soul, the lawyer made himself her protector, the soldier 
promised himself that he would be her tutor ; as for Minoret, 
he was father, mother, and doctor in one. 

After acclimatizing himself, as it were, the old man fell 
into habits of life, regulated as it must be in all provincial 
towns. With Ursule as an excuse, he never received any one 
in the morning, and asked nobody to dinner; his friends 
could join him at six o’clock, and remain with him till mid- 
night. The first comers found newspapers on the drawing- 
room table, and read while waiting for the others, or some- 
times went to meet the doctor if he were out walking. These 
quiet habits were not merely the requirement of old age; 
they were also a wise and deep-laid precaution on the part of 
a man of the world to prevent his happiness being troubled 
by the restless curiosity of his relations, or the petty gossip of 
a country town. He would concede nothing to the caprb 
cious goddess public opinion, whose tyranny — one of the 
curses of France — was about to be established, and to make 


36 


URSULE MIROUET. 

our whole country one single province. So as soon as the 
little girl was weaned and could walk, he sent away the cook 
whom his niece, Madame Minoret-Levrault, had found for 
him, on discovering that she reported to the postmistress 
everything that went on in his house. 

Little Ursule’s nurse, the widow of a poor laborer owning 
no name but that he was christened by, and who came from 
Bougival, had lost her last baby at the age of six months; and 
the doctor, knowing her to be an honest creature, engaged 
her as wet nurse, in pity for her destitution. Having no 
money, and coming from La Bresse, where her family lived in 
poverty, Antoinette Patris, widow of Pierre dit de Bougival, 
naturally attached herself to Ursule, as foster-mothers do 
attach themselves to a sucking child as it grows up. This 
blind motherly affection was reinforced by domestic attach- 
ment. Warned beforehand of the doctor’s intentions, La 
Bougival learned to cook on the sly, made herself tidy, and 
fell into the old man’s ways. She took the greatest care of 
the furniture and the rooms ; in short, she was indefatigable. 
Not only did the doctor insist that his private life should be 
screened from the world ; he had reasons of his own for keep- 
ing all knowledge of his affairs from his heirs. Thus by the 
time he had been at Nemours a year there was no one in his 
house but La Bougival, on whose discretion he could abso- 
lutely rely, and he disguised his real reasons under the all- 
powerful plea of economy. To the great joy of his family, 
he became miserly. Without underhand wheedling, solely as 
a result of her solicitude and devotedness, La Bougival, who 
at the time when this drama opens was forty-three years old, 
was housekeeper to the doctor and his little proteg£, the 
pivot on which the whole house turned, in fact, his confi- 
dential servant. She had been named La Bougival in conse- 
quence of the impossibility of calling her by her Christian 
name of Antoinette, for names and faces must follow a law of 
harmony. 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


37 


The doctor’s avarice was not an empty word ; but it was 
for a purpose. From 1817 he gave up two of his newspapers, 
and ceased to subscribe to periodical magazines. His annual 
outlay, which all Nemours could reckon, was not more than 
eighteen hundred francs. Like all old men, his requirements 
in linen, clothing, and shoes were a mere trifle. Every six 
months he made a journey to Paris, no doubt to draw and 
invest his dividends. In fifteen years he never said a word 
that had anything to do with his affairs. His confidence in 
Bongrand was of later date ; he never spoke to him of his 
plans till after the Revolution of 1830. These were the only 
things in the doctor’s life known at that time to the townsfolk 
and his heirs. As to his political opinions, as his house was 
rated at no more than a hundred francs in taxes, he never 
interfered, and would have nothing to say to subscriptions on 
either the Royalist or the Liberal side. His well-known 
horror of priests and his deism so little loved demonstrations, 
that when his nephew, Minoret-Levrault, sent a traveling 
bookseller to his house to propose that he should buy the 
“Cure Meslier ” and “General Foy’s Addresses,” he turned 
the man out of the house. Tolerance on such terms was quite 
inexplicable to the Liberals of Nemours. 

The doctor’s three collateral heirs, Minoret-Levrault and 
his wife, Monsieur and Madame Massin-Levrault, junior, 
Monsieur and Madame Cremiere-Ciemiere — who shall be 
called simply Cremiere, Massin, and Minoret, since such 
elaborate distinctions are only needed in the Gatinais — these 
three families, too busy to create another centre, met con- 
stantly, as people only meet in small towns. The postmaster 
gave a grand dinner on his son’s birthday, a ball at the Car- 
nival, and another on the anniversary of his wedding-day, 
and to these he asked all the townsfolk of Nemours. The tax- 
receiver also gathered his relations and friends about him 
twice a year. The justice’s registrar being, as he said, too 
poor to launch out in such extravagance, lived narrowly in a 


33 


VRSULE MIROUET. 

house half-way down the High Street, of which the ground 
floor was let to his sister, the mistress of the letter-post — 
another benefaction of the doctor’s. But in the course of 
the year these three inheritors or their wives met in the town 
or out walking, at the market in the morning, on their door- 
steps, or on Sunday, after mass, on the church square, as at 
this moment, so that they saw each other every day. 

Now for the last three years more especially, the doctor’s 
age, his miserliness, and his fortune justified allusions or 
direct remarks relating to their prospects, which, passing 
from one to another, at last made the doctor and his heirs 
equally famous. For these six months not a week had 
passed without the friends and neighbors of the Minoret 
family speaking to them with covert envy of the day when 
the old man’s eyes would be closed and his money-boxes 
opened. 

“ Doctor Minoret may be a physician, and have come to 
an understanding with death,” said one; “but only God is 
eternal.” 

“ Bah ! he will bury us all ; he is in better health than we 
are,” one of the expectant heirs would reply hypocritically. 

“ Well, if you don’t get it, your children will — unless that 
little Ursule ” 

“ He will not leave her everything? ” another would reply, 
interrupting the last speaker. 

Ursule, as Madame Massin had prognosticated, was the 
real bugbear of the family, the Damocles’ sword ; and 
Madame Cremiere’s favorite last word, “ Those who live 
will know,” showed plainly enough that they wished her ill 
rather than well. 

The tax-receiver and the registrar, who were poor by com- 
parison with the postmaster, had often, by way of conversa- 
tion, calculated the doctor’s property. As they walked along 
by the canal or on the high-road, if they saw their uncle 
coming they looked at each other piteously. 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


39 


“ He has provided himself with some elixir of life, no 
doubt,” said the one. 

“ He is in league with the devil,” said the other. 

“ He ought to leave us the lion’s share, for that fat Minoret 
wants for nothing.” 

“ Oh, Minoret has a son who will get rid of a great deal of 
his money for him! ” 

“ How much, now, do you suppose the doctor’s fortune 
may run to?” said the registrar. 

“Well, at the end of twelve years, twelve thousand francs 
saved every year come to a hundred and forty-four thousand, 
and compound interest will have produced at least a hundred 
thousand francs more; but as, under his Paris lawyer’s advice, 
he must have turned his money to advantage now and again, 
and as he would have invested up to 1822 at eight or seven 
and a half per cent, in government securities, the old fellow 
must at this time have about four hundred thousand francs to 
turn over, to say nothing of his fourteen thousand francs at 
five per cent., worth one hundred and sixteen at the present 
moment. If he were to die to-morrow and leave Ursule an 
equal share, we should get seven to eight hundred thousand 
francs, not to mention the house and furniture.” 

“ Well, a hundred thousand to Minoret, a hundred thou- 
sand to the little girl, and three hundred thousand to each of 
us. That would be the fair thing.” 

“ Yes, that would keep us in shoe-leather.” 

“If he should do that,” cried Massin, “I would sell my 
appointment and buy a fine estate. I would try to be made 
judge at Fontainebleau, and be elected deputy.” 

“ I would buy a stockbroker’s business,” said the tax- 
receiver. 

“ Unfortunately, that little girl on his arm and the cure 
have so blockaded him that we cannot get at him.” 

“ At any rate, we are quite certain that he will leave noth- 
ing to the church.” 


40 


URSULE MIROUET 

It may now be understood that the heirs were in agonies at 
seeing their uncle going to mass. The most stupid have wit 
enough to imagine injury to their interests. Interest is the 
moving spirit of the peasant as of the diplomat, and on that 
ground the most stupid in appearance may perhaps prove the 
sharpest. Hence this terrible argument: “If that little 
Ursule is able to bring her protector within the pale of the 
church, she will certainly have power to secure her own in- 
heritance/’ blazed out in letters of fire in the mind of the 
most obtuse of the inheritors. The postmaster had forgotten 
the enigma in his son’s letter in hurrying to the square ; for 
if the doctor were really in church following the order of 
prayer, they might lose two hundred and fifty thousand francs. 
It must be admitted that their fears were based on the strongest 
and most legitimate of social sentiments, namely, on family 
interest. 

“Well, Monsieur Minoret,” said the mayor — a retired 
miller who had turned Royalist, a Levrault-Cremiere — “ when 
the devil was old, the devil a monk would be ! Your uncle, 
I am told, has come over to us.” 

“Better late than never, cousin,” replied the postmaster, 
trying to conceal his annoyance. 

“ How that man would laugh if we were disappointed ! 
He is quite capable of making his son marry that cursed 
little hussy. May the devil get his tail round her ! ” cried 
Cremiere, shaking his fist at the mayor as he went in under 
the porch. 

“What on earth is the matter with old Crdmidre?” said 
the butcher, the eldest son of a Levrault-Levrault. “Is he 
not pleased to see his uncle take the road to paradise? ” 

“ Who would ever have believed it? ” said the registrar. 

“ It is never safe to say to the well, * I will never drink of 
your water!’” replied the notary, who, seeing the group 
from afar, left his wife to go on to church alone. 

“Now, Monsieur Dionis,” said Cremiere, taking the 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


41 


lawyer by the arm, “what do you advise us to do in these 
circumstances ? ” 

“I advise you,” said Dionis, addressing the expectant 
heirs, “ to go to bed and get up at the usual hours, to eat your 
soup before it gets cold, to put your shoes on your feet and 
your hat on your head ; in short, to go on exactly as if 
nothing had happened.” 

“ You are a poor comforter ! ” said Massin with a cunning 
glance. 

In spite of his short, fat figure, and his thick, crushed- 
looking features, Cremiere-Dionis was as slippery as silk. To 
make a fortune he was in secret partnership with Massin, 
whom he no doubt kept informed when peasants were in diffi- 
culties, and which plots of ground he might devour. So the 
two men could pick and choose, never letting a good chance 
escape them, and dividing the profits of this usury on mort- 
gage, which delays, though it cannot hinder, the action of the 
peasantry on the land. Hence Dionis felt a keen interest in 
the doctor’s will, less on account of Minoret the postmaster 
and Cremiere the tax-receiver than for his friend the regis- 
trar’s sake. Massin’s share would, sooner or later, come to 
swell the capital on which the partners traded in the district. 

“ We must try to find out, through Monsieur Bongrand, 
who has fired this shot,” replied the lawyer in a low voice, as 
a warning to Massin to lay low. 

“What are you doing here, Minoret?” was suddenly 
heard from a little woman who bore down on the group, in 
the midst of which the postmaster was visible as a tower. 
“You do not know what has become of Desire, and you seem 
to have taken root there on your two feet when I fancied 
you were on horseback ! Good-morning, ladies and gentle- 
men ! ” 

This spare little woman, pale and fair, dressed in a cotton 
gown — white, with a large flowered pattern in chocolate- 
color — in an embroidered cap trimmed with lace, and a small 


42 


UR SOLE MIROUET. 


green shawl over her flat shoulders, was the postmistress, who 
made the stoutest postillions quake, the servants, and the 
carters ; who kept the till and the books ; and managed the 
house with her finger and eye, as the neighbors were in the 
habit of saying. Like a true, thrifty housewife, she had not 
a single article of jewelry. She did not “ favor frippery and 
trash,” as she put it; she liked what was durable, and, in 
spite of its being Sunday, she had on her black silk apron 
with pockets, in which a bunch of keys jingled. Her shrill 
voice was ear-splitting. In spite of the sweet blue of her 
eyes, her hard gaze was in evident harmony with the thin lips 
of a tightly set mouth, and a high, projecting, and very 
despotic brow. Her glance was sharp, sharper still were her 
gestures and words. “ Zelie being obliged to have will enough 
for two, had always had enough for three,” Goupil used to say ; 
and it was he who noted the successive reigns of three young 
post-boys, very neatly kept, whom Zelie had set up after 
seven years’ service. Indeed, the spiteful clerk always called 
them Postillion I., Postillion II., and Postillion III. But the 
small influence exerted in the house by these young men, and 
their perfect obedience, proved that Zelie had simply and 
purely taken an interest in really good fellows. 

‘‘Ay, Zelie values zeal,” the clerk would reply to any one 
who made such a remark. 

This piece of scandal was, however, improbable. Since the 
birth of her son, whom she nursed herself, though it was im- 
possible to see how, the postmistress had thought only of add- 
ing to her fortune, and devoted herself without respite to the 
management of her immense business. To rob her of a truss 
of straw or a few bushels of oats, to detect her in error in the 
most complicated accounts, was a thing impossible, though 
she wrote a cat’s scrawl, and knew nothing of arithmetic 
beyond addition and subtraction. She walked out solely to 
inspect her hay, her oats, and her after-crops ; then she would 
send her man to fetch in the crops, and her postillions to pack 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


43 


the hay, and tell them within a hundredweight how much 
they could get off this or that field. Though she was the soul 
of the huge body known as Minoret-Levrault, and led him by 
his idiotically snub nose, she was liable to the frights which 
more or less constantly agitate those who quell and lead wild 
beasts, and she quarreled with him frequently. The post- 
boys knew by the rowings they got from Minoret when his 
wife had scolded him, for her rage glanced off on to them. 
But, indeed, Madame Minoret was as shrewd as she was 
avaricious. 

“Where would Minoret be without his wife?” was a by- 
word in more than one household in the town. 

“ When you hear what is happening to us you will be beside 
yourself too,” replied the Master of Nemours. 

“ Well, what is it ? ” 

“ Ursule has taken Doctor Minoret to mass.” 

Zelie Levrault’s eyes seemed to dilate; for an instant she 
was silent, yellow with rage; then crying, “I must see it to 
believe it,” she rushed into the church. The Host was just 
elevated. Favored by the general attitude of worship, she 
was able to look along each row of chairs and benches as she 
went up past the chapels to the place where Ursule knelt, and 
by her side she saw the old man bareheaded. 

If you can recall the portraits of Barbe-Marbois, Boissy- 
d’Anglas, Morellet, Helvetius, and Frederick the Great, you 
will have an exact idea of the head of Doctor Minoret, who in 
his green old age was a good deal like these famous personages. 
These heads, struck as it might seem from the same die, for they 
lend themselves to the medalist’s art, present a severe and 
almost puritanical profile, cold coloring, a mathematical brain, 
a certain narrowness of face, as if it had been squeezed, astute 
eyes, grave lips, and something aristocratic in sentiment rather 
than in habits, in the intellect rather than in the character. 
They all have lofty foreheads, receding a little at the top, 
which betrays a tendency to materialism. You will find all 


44 


URSULE MIROUET. 


these leading characteristics of the head, and the look of the 
face, in the portraits of the encyclopedists, of the orators of 
the Girondins, and of the men of that time whose religious 
belief was almost a blank, and who, though calling themselves 
deists, were atheists. A deist is an atheist with an eye to the 
off-chance of some advantage. 

Old Minoret had a forehead of this type, but furrowed with 
wrinkles, and it derived a sort of childlike ingenuousness 
from the way in which his silvery hair, combed back like a 
woman’s at her toilet, curled in thin locks on his black coat ; 
for he persisted in dressing, as in the days of his youth, in 
black silk stockings, shoes with gold buckles, knee-breeches 
of rich silk, a white waistcoat, across which lay the black rib- 
bon of Saint Michael, and a black coat with the red rosette 
in the buttonhole. This characteristic head, its cold pallor 
softened by the ivory-yellow tone of old age, was under the 
full light from a window. At the moment when the postmis- 
tress came in, the doctor’s blue eyes, with slightly reddened 
lids and pathetic lines, were fixed on the altar ; new convic- 
tion had given them a new expression. His spectacles, laid 
in his prayer-book, marked the page where he had ceased to 
read. With his arms folded across his breast, the tall, spare 
old man, standing in an attitude which proclaimed the full 
power of all his faculties, and something immovable in his 
faith, never ceased from gazing at the altar with a humble 
look, rejuvenescent through hope ; not choosing to see his 
nephew’s wife, who stood rooted almost face to face with him, 
as if to reproach him for this return to God. 

On seeing every face turned to look at her, Zelie hastily re- 
tired, and came out on to the square again less precipitately 
than she had gone into the church ; she had counted on that 
inheritance, and the inheritance was becoming problematical. 
She found the registrar, the tax-receiver, and their wives in 
even greater consternation than before. Goupil had taken 
pleasure in tormenting them. 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


45 


“ It is not here, on the square, and under the eyes of the 
whole town, that we can discuss our private affairs,” said the 
postmistress ; “ come to my house. You will not be in the 
way, Monsieur Dionis,” she added to the lawyer. 

So the probable disinheritance of the Massins, the Cre- 
mieres, and the postmaster was to become the talk of the 
country. 

Just as the heirs and the notary were about to cross the 
square on their way to the house, the clatter of the diligence 
arriving at top-speed made a tremendous noise ; it stopped at 
the coach-office, a few yards from the church, at the top of the 
High Street. 

“ Why, like you, Minoret, I had forgotten Desire,” said 
Zelie. “ Let us go to meet him ; he is almost a lawyer now, 
and this business is partly his concern.” 

The arrival of a diligence is always a diversion, and when 
it is behind time something interesting may be expected ; so 
the crowd rushed to see the “ Dueler.” 

“There is Desire,” was a general cry. 

At once the tyrant and the ringleader of fun in Nemours, 
Desire’s visits always brought some excitement to the town. 
A favorite with the young men, to whom he was liberal, his 
presence was to them a stimulant ; but his pleasures were so 
much dreaded, that more than one family was glad that his 
studies for the law should be carried on in Paris. Desire 
Minoret, slight, thin, and fair like his mother, with her blue 
eyes and colorless complexion, smiled at the crowd from the 
coach door, and jumped out to embrace her. A slight sketch 
of this youth will explain Zelie’s flattered pride on beholding 
him. 

The young law student wore neat little boots, white English 
drill trousers with patent-leather straps, a handsome cravat 
carefully folded, and a still handsomer pin, a smart fancy 
waistcoat, and in its pocket a flat watch with a dangling 
chain ; a short blue cloth overcoat, and a gray hat. But 


46 


UR SUL E MI ROUE T. 


vulgar riches were betrayed in the gold buttons to his waist- 
coat, and a ring worn outside his gloves of purplish kid. He 
carried a cane with a chased gold knob. 

“ You will lose your watch/’ said his mother as she kissed 
him. 

‘‘It is worn so,” said he, submitting to his father’s em- 
brace. 

“Well, cousin, so you will soon be a full-blown lawyer,” 
said Massin. 

“I am to be sworn when the courts reopen,” said he, 
waving an acknowledgment of the friendly greetings of the 
crowd. 

“Then we shall have some fun?” said Goupil, shaking 
hands with him. 

“ Ah ! there you are, old ape ! ” answered Desire. 

“ Having worked for your license, you think you may take 
it, I suppose ! ” retorted the clerk, mortified at being so 
familiarly treated before so many people. 

“ For his lies? Take what? ” asked Madame Cremiere of 
her husband. 

“You know all my things, Cabirolle ! ” cried Desire to the 
old purple and pimply-faced conductor. “ Have them all 
taken down to the house.” 

“Your horses are in a lather,” said Zelie roughly to Cabi- 
rolle. “ Have you no sense at all that you drive them like 
that ? You are a greater brute than they are.” 

“But Monsieur Desir6 insisted on getting on as fast as 
possible, to relieve your anxiety.” 

“As there has been no accident, why risk killing your 
horses ? ” said she. 

Friendly greetings, hand-shaking, and the eagerness of his 
young acquaintance surrounding Desire, all the incidents of 
arrival, and details as to the accident which had occasioned 
the delay, took up so much time that the party of inheritors, 
increased by their friends, got back to the church just as mass 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


47 


was ended. By a trick of chance, which allows itself strange 
caprices, Desire saw Ursule under the church porch as he 
passed, and was quite startled by her beauty. The young man 
suddenly paused, and necessarily checked the movements of 
his parents. 

Ursule had taken her godfather’s arm, which obliged her to 
hold her prayer-book in her right hand and her parasol in the 
left ; and, in doing so, she displayed the native grace with 
which graceful women manage to get over the little difficulties 
of their dainty womanhood. If the mind betrays itself in 
everything, it may be said that her demeanor expressed her 
exquisite ingenuousness. 

Ursule wore a white muslin dress, shaped loosely like a 
dressing-gown, with blue bows at intervals ; the cape, trimmed 
with similar ribbon run into a wide hem, and fastened like 
the dress with bows, suggested the beauty of her figure; her 
throat, of ivory whiteness, was thrown into charming relief 
by all this blue — the true cosmetic for fair complexions. 

A blue sash, with floating ends, marked a girlish waist and 
what seemed a pliant figure, one of the most seductive graces 
of woman. She wore a rice-straw hat, simply trimmed with 
ribbons to match those on her dress. It was tied with a 
bow under her chin ; and this, while enhancing the excessive 
whiteness of the hat, did not detract from that of her lovely 
complexion. 

Her fine, bright hair, which she herself dressed in wide 
plaits, fastened into loops on each side of her face a la Berthe , 
caught the eye by the shining bosses of the crossing tresses. 
Her gray eyes, soft, though proud, harmonized with a well- 
moulded brow. A delicate color flushed her cheeks like a 
rosy cloud, and gave life to a face that was regular without 
being insipid, for nature had bestowed on her the rare priv- 
ilege of a pure outline with an expressive countenance. 

The virtue of her life was written in the perfect accordance 
of her features, her movements, and the general expression 


48 


VRSULE Ml ROUE T. 


of her individuality, which might serve as a model of trust- 
fulness or of modesty. 

Her health was excellent, but not coarsely robust, so that she 
looked elegant. Her light gloves left it to be inferred that 
she had pretty hands. Her arched and slender feet were shod 
with dainty little bronze kid boots, trimmed with a fringe of 
brown silk. Her blue sash, in which a little flat watch made 
a boss, while a blue purse with gold tassels hung through it, 
attracted the eye of every woman there, and gave cause for 
remark. 

“ He has given her a new watch,” said Madame Cremiere, 
squeezing her husband’s arm. 

“Why, it is Ursule!” exclaimed Desire. “I did not 
recognize her.” 

“Well, my dear uncle, this is an event ! ” said the post- 
master, pointing to where the whole town had fallen into two 
lines along the old man’s way. “Everybody wants, to see 
you.” 

“ Is it the Abbe Chaperon or Ursule who has converted 
you, uncle?” said Massin, bowing with jesuitical obsequious- 
ness to the doctor and his companion. 

“It is Ursule,” said the old man curtly, and without stop- 
ping, as a man who is annoyed. 

The evening before, as he finished his rubber with Ursule, 
the town doctor, and Bongrand, he had said, “ I shall go to 
mass to-morrow;” and even if the justice had not then re- 
plied, “Your heirs will never have another night’s sleep ! ” a 
single glance now would have sufficed to enable the sagacious 
and clear-sighted old man to read the temper of his heirs in 
the look of their faces. Zelie’s irruption into the church, the 
flash he had caught in her eye, the meeting of all the inter- 
ested parties on the square, and the expression of their coun- 
tenances on seeing Ursule — all revealed freshly revived hatred 
and sordid fears. 

“This is your doing, mademoiselle,” said Madame Cr6- 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


49 


miere, interposing with a low courtesy. “ It is no trouble to 
you to work miracles.” 

“ The miracle is God’s, madame,” replied Ursule. 

“ Oh, indeed ! God’s,” exclaimed Minoret-Levrault. “ My 
father-in-law used to say that God was a name for many a 
dark horse.” 

“ His ideas were those of a horse coper ! ” said the doctor 
severely. 

Now, then,” said Minoret to his wife and son, “are you 
not coming to pay your respects to my uncle ? ” 

“ I could not contain myself face to face with that sneaking 
slut ! ” exclaimed Zelie, leading away her son. 

“You would be wise, uncle,” said Madame Massin, “not 
to go to church without a little black velvet cap ; the parish 
church is very damp.” 

“ Pah ! niece,” said the old man, looking round at his fol- 
lowers. “ The sooner I am laid to rest, the sooner you will 
dance.” 

He walked on, dragging Ursule with him, and seeming in 
such haste that they were left to themselves. 

“Why do you answer them with such hard words? It is 
not kind,” said Ursule, shaking his arm with a little refrac- 
tory gesture. 

“ My hatred for hypocrites has always been the same, be- 
fore as well as since my conversion. I have done them all 
kindness, and I do not ask for gratitude ; but not one of all 
those people sent a flower on your birthday, the only day I 
keep.” 

At some little distance from the doctor and Ursule, Ma- 
dame de Portenduere was dragging herself along, overwhelmed, 
as it seemed, with suffering. She was one of those old women 
in whose dress we may still trace the spirit of the last century, 
who wear pansy-colored gowns with tight sleeves of a cut now 
only to be seen in portraits by Madame Lebrun ; black lace 
scarfs, and bonnets of extinct shapes, in harmony with their 
4 


50 


URSULE MIROUET. 


slow and solemn gait ; as if they still walked in hoops, and 
felt them about them, as those who have had an arm cut off 
sometimes move the limb they have lost. Their long, pale 
faces, with deeply shadowed eyes and blighted brows, are not 
devoid of a certain melancholy grace in spite of a front of 
dejected curls ; they drape their heads in old lace, which now 
has no light flutter over their cheeks ; but over the whole 
mass of ruins predominates an indescribable dignity of man- 
ner and look. 

This old lady’s red and puckered eyes plainly showed that 
she had wept during the service. She walked like a person 
in some anxiety, and seemed to be expecting somebody, for 
she looked back. Now, that Madame de Portenduere should 
look back was an event as serious as Doctor Minoret’s conver- 
sion. 

“ To whom can Madame Portenduere owe a grudge? ” said 
Madame Massin, as she came up with the heirs, who were 
dumfounded by the doctor’s retorts. 

“ She is looking for the cure,” said Dionis, striking his 
forehead like a man suddenly struck by a remembrance or 
some forgotten idea. “I have it! I see my way ; the in- 
heritance is saved ! Come, we will all breakfast cheerfully 
with Madame Minoret.” 

The eagerness with which the whole party followed the 
notary to the posting-house may easily be imagined. Goupil 
clung to his comrade, taking his arm, saying in his ear with a 
revolting smile : “ There are crayfish ! ” 

“What do I care?” replied the son of the house w r ith a 
shrug. “ I am madly in love with Florine, the most heavenly 
creature in the world.” 

“What on earth is Florine without a surname?” asked 
Goupil. “I am too much your friend to allow you to be 
made a fool of by hussies.” 

“ Florine is adored by the famous Nathan, and my folly is 
of no use, for she positively refuses to marry me.” 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


61 


“ Girls who are rash with their bodies are sometimes pru- 
dent with their brains/’ said Goupil. 

“If you could but see her, only once, you would not make 
use of such expressions,” said Desire languishingly. 

“If I saw you destroying your prospects for what can be 
only a fancy,” retorted Goupil, with a warmth that might 
perhaps have taken in Bongrand, “I would go and wreck 
that doll as Varney wrecked Amy Robsart in Kenilworth ! 
Your wife ought to be a d’Aiglemont, a Mademoiselle du 
Rouvre, and open your way to being a deputy to the Cham- 
ber. My future is mortgaged to yours, and I will not allow 
you to play the fool.” 

“I am rich enough to be content with happiness,” replied 
Desire. 

“Well, what are you two plotting?” said Zelie to Goupil, 
hailing the two young men, who were standing together in 
the wide stable-yard. 

The doctor turned down the Rue des Bourgeois, and walked 
on, as briskly as a young man, to his house, where, in the course 
of the past week, the strange event had taken place which was 
just now the ruling thought of all the town of Nemours, and 
of which some account must be given to render this story, 
and the notary’s singular remark to the heirs, more perfectly 
intelligible. 

The doctor’s father-in-law, the famous harpsichord player 
and instrument-maker, Valentin Mirouet, one of our most 
celebrated organists, died in 1785, leaving a natural son, the 
child of his old-age, whom he had recognized and called by his 
name, but who was a thorough scapegrace. He had not the 
consolation of seeing this spoilt child when on his death-bed ; 
Joseph Mirouet, a singer and composer, after coming out in 
Italian opera under an assumed name, had run away to Ger- 
many with a young girl. The old instrument-maker recom- 
mended this lad, who was full of talent, to his son-in-law. 


52 


URSULE MIROUET. 


explaining that his object in not marrying the boy’s mother 
was to protect the interests of his daughter, Madame Minoret. 
The doctor promised to give the unfortunate youth half of 
the property left by the old man, whose stock and business 
were bought up by Erard. 

He set to work diplomatically to find his natural half- 
brother, Joseph Mirouet; but one evening Grimm told him 
that, after enlisting in a Prussian regiment, the artist had de- 
serted, and, taking a false name, had escaped all search. 

Joseph Mirouet, gifted by nature with an enchanting voice, 
a fine figure, and a handsome face, being a composer of taste 
and spirit into the bargain, led for fifteen years the Bohemian 
existence which Hofmann of Berlin has so well described. 
But at the age of forty he was reduced to such misery that in 
1806 he seized the opportunity of becoming a Frenchman 
again. He then settled at Hamburg, where he married the 
daughter of a respectable citizen, who, being music-mad, fell 
in love with the singer, whose fame was still in the future, and 
who devoted herself to its attainment. But after fifteen years 
of penury, Joseph Mirouet’s head could not stand the wine 
of opulence; his extravagant nature reasserted itself; and, 
though he made his wife happy, in a few years he had spent 
all her fortune. Misery again came upon them. The house- 
hold must indeed have been living wretchedly for Joseph 
Mirouet to come down to enlisting as one of the band in a 
French regiment. 

In 1813, by the merest chance, the surgeon-major of this 
regiment, struck by the name of Mirouet, wrote to Doctor 
Minoret, to whom he owed some obligation. The reply came 
at once. In 1814, before the capitulation of Paris, Joseph 
Mirouet had found a home there, and there his wife died in 
giving birth to a little girl whom the doctor named Ursule, 
after his wife. The bandmaster did not long survive his wife ; 
he, like her, was worn out by fatigue and privation. On his 
death-bed the hapless musician bequeathed his little girl to the 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


53 


doctor, who was her godfather, in spite of his repugnance for 
what he called church mummeries. 

After losing every child, either by miscarriage, at the time 
of its birth, or within the first year of its life, the doctor had 
anxiously looked forward to their last hope. But when a 
sickly, nervous, delicate woman begins with a miscarriage, it 
is common enough to see her successive failures, as in the case 
of Ursule Minoret, in spite of her husband’s care, watchful- 
ness, and learning. The poor man had often blamed himself 
for their persistent desire to have children. The last of the 
little ones born to them, after an interval of more than two 
years, died in 1792, the victim of constitutional nervousness, 
inherited from its mother, if we may believe the physiologists, 
who say that, in the inscrutable phenomena of generation, a 
child takes its blood from the father and its nervous system 
from the mother. The doctor, compelled to forego the joys 
of his strongest feelings, no doubt found in benevolence some 
indemnity for disappointed fatherhood. 

All through his married life, so cruelly agitated, he had 
wished above everything for a little fair girl, one of those 
flowers which are the delight of a household ; so he gladly 
accepted his half-brother’s bequest, and transferred all his 
vanished hopes and dreams to the little orphan. For two 
years he watched over the minutest details of Ursule’s life, as 
Cato over Pompey; he would not have her fed, or taken up, 
or put to bed without his superintendence. His experience 
and his science were all devoted to this child. After endur- 
ing all the pangs, the alternations of fear and hope, the 
anxieties and joys of a mother, he was so happy as to find 
vigorous vitality and a deeply sensitive nature in this child of 
the flaxen-haired German mother and the artistic Frenchman. 
The happy old man watched the growth of that yellow hair 
with the feelings of a mother — first pale down, then silk, then 
light, fine hair, so caressing to the touch of caressing fingers. 
He would kiss the tiny feet, the toes through whose fine skin 


54 


URSULE MIROUET. 


the blood shows pink, making them look like rosebuds. He 
was crazy over the child. 

When she tried to speak, or when she fixed her lovely, soft 
blue eyes on the objects about her, with the wondering look 
which would seem to be the dawning of ideas, and which she 
ended with a laugh, he would sit in front of her for whole 
hours, and he and Jordy would try to find out the reasons — 
which to many have seemed mere caprices — concealed under 
the smallest manifestations of that delightful phase of life 
when the child is at once flower and fruit, a bewildered intel- 
ligence, perpetual motion, and vehement desire. Little 
Ursule’s beauty and sweetness made her so precious to the 
doctor that for her he would gladly have changed the laws of 
nature ; he would sometimes tell his friend Jordy that he 
suffered from pain in his teeth when Ursule was cutting hers. 

When old men love a child there is no limit to their pas- 
sion ; they adore it. For this tiny creature’s sake they 
silence their pet manias, and recall every detail of their past 
life. Their experience, their forbearance, their patience, all 
the acquisitions of life — a treasure so painfully amassed — are 
poured out for this young life by which they grow young 
again, and they make up for motherliness by intelligence. 
Their wisdom, always on the alert, is as good as a mother’s 
intuition ; they remember the exquisite care which in a 
mother is divination, and infuse it into the exercise of a 
pitifulness whose strength is great, no doubt, in proportion to 
that excessive weakness. The slowness of their movements 
supplies the place of maternal gentleness. And then, in 
them, as in children, life is reduced to the simplest expres- 
sion ; if a mother is a slave from feeling, the negation of all 
passion and the absence of all self-interest allow the old man 
to sacrifice himself wholly. Hence it is not uncommon to see 
children and old men make great friends. 

The old officer, the old cure, and the old doctor, happy in 
Ursule’s caresses and caprices, were never tired of answering 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


55 


her or playing with her. Her childish petulance, far from 
fretting them, was their delight; and they indulged all her 
desires, while making everything a subject of instruction. 
Thus the little girl grew up in the midst of old men, who 
smiled on her, and were to her like so many mothers, all 
equally attentive and watchful. Thanks to this learned educa- 
tion, Ursule’s soul developed in a congenial sphere. This 
rare plant found the soil that suited it, inhaled the elements of 
its true life, and assimilated the flood of its native sunshine. 

“In what faith will you bring this child up?” asked the 
Abbe Chaperon of Minoret, when Ursule was six years old. 

“ In yours,” replied the doctor. 

He, an atheist after the pattern of Monsieur de Wolmar in 
the “ Nouvelle Heloise,” did not see that he had any right to 
deprive Ursule of the benefits offered by the Catholic faith. 

The physician, just then sitting on a bench outside the 
window of the Chinese summer-house, felt his hand warmly 
pressed by that of the cure. 

“Yes, cure, whenever she asks me about God, I shall refer 
her t o her friend ‘ Sapron/ ” said he, mimicking Ursule’s baby 
accent. “I wish to see whether religious feeling is innate. 
So far, therefore, I have done nothing either for or against 
the tendencies of this young soul ; but I have already, in my 
heart, appointed you her spiritual director.” 

“It will be accounted to you by God, I trust ! ” said the 
cure, gently patting his hands together, and raising them to 
heaven, as though lie were putting up a short mental prayer. 

So, at the age of six, the little orphan came under the 
religious influence of the cure, as she had already under that 
of her old friend Jordy. 

The captain, formerly a professor in one of the old military 
schools, and interested in grammar and the divergencies of 
European tongues, had studied the problem of an universal 
language. This learned man, patient as all old teachers are, 
made it his pleasure to teach Ursule to read and write, in- 


56 


URSULE MIROUET 


structing her in French, and in so much arithmetic as it was 
needful that she should know. The doctor’s extensive library 
allowed of a choice of books fit to be read by a child, and 
adapted to amuse as well as to instruct her. The soldier and 
the priest left her mind to develop naturally and easily, as the 
doctor left her body. Ursule learned in play. Religion in- 
cluded reflection. 

Thus left to the divine culture of a nature guided by these 
three judicious teachers into a realm of purity, Ursule tended 
towards feeling rather than duty, and took as her rule of life 
the voice of conscience rather than social law. In her, beauty 
of sentiment and action would always be spontaneous ; her 
judgment would come in to confirm the impulse of her heart. 
She was fated to do right as a pleasure before doing it as an 
obligation. This tone is the peculiar result of a Christian 
education. These principles, quite unlike those to be incul- 
cated in a man, are suited to a woman, the soul and conscience 
of the family, the latent elegance of home life, the queen, or 
little less, of the household. 

They all three acted in the same manner with this child. 
Far from being startled by the audacity of childish innocence, 
they explained to Ursule the purpose of things and their 
known processes, without ever giving her an inaccurate impres- 
sion. When in her questioning about a plant, a flower, or a 
star, she went directly to God, the professor and the doctor 
alike told her that only the cure could answer her. Neither 
of them intruded on the ground of the other. Her godfather 
took charge of her physical progress and the matters of daily 
life; her lessons were Jordy’s affair; morality, metaphysics, 
and all higher matters were left to the cure. 

This excellent education was not counteracted by bad ser- 
vants, as is sometimes the case in wealthier houses. La Bou- 
gival, well lectured on the subject — and, indeed, far too 
simple in mind and nature to interfere — did nothing to mar 
the work of these great spirits. 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


57 


Thus Ursule, a privileged creature, had to nurture her three 
good genii, who found their task easy and pleasant with so 
sweet a nature as hers. This manly tenderness, this serious- 
ness tempered by smiles, this freedom without risk, this in- 
cessant care of mind and body, had made her, at the age of 
nine, a delightful and lovely child. Then, unfortunately, the 
fatherly trio was broken up. In the following year the old 
captain died, leaving it to the doctor and the cure to carry 
on his work, after he had achieved the most difficult part of 
it. Flowers would spring up naturally in a soil so well pre- 
pared. The good gentleman had, during these nine years, 
saved a thousand francs a year, and left ten thousand francs 
to his little Ursule, that she might have something to remem- 
ber him by all her life through. In his will, full of pathetic 
feeling, he begged his legatee to spend the four or five hun- 
dred francs a year of interest on this little capital exclusively 
on dress. 

When the justice placed seals on his old friend’s possessions, 
he found, in a closet which no one had ever been allowed to 
enter, a quantity of toys, most of them broken, and all used ; 
toys of the past, piously treasured, which Monsieur Bongrand 
himself was to burn, by the poor captain’s desire. 

Not long after this, Ursule was to take her first communion. 
The Abbe Chaperon devoted a whole year to instructing the 
young girl, in whom heart and brain, so early developed, but 
so wisely dependent on each other, required a specific spiritual 
nourishment. And this initiation into a knowledge of divine 
things was of such a nature that from this period, when the 
soul takes its religious mould, Ursule became a pious and 
mystical young creature, whose character was always superior 
to events, and whose heart could triumph over adversity. 
Then it was that a secret struggle began between infidel old 
age and fully-believing youth ; a struggle of which she who 
had challenged it was long unaware, but of which the issue 
had set the town by the ears ; while it was destined to have 


53 


URSULE MIROUET. 


great influence on Ursule’s future life, by unchaining against 
her the doctor’s collateral relations. 

During the first six months of the year 1824, Ursule almost 
always spent the morning at the cure’s house. The old doctor 
divined the abbe’s intention ; he wanted to make Ursule 
herself an invincible argument. The unbeliever, beloved by 
his god-daughter as though she were his own child, would 
believe in her simplicity, and be attracted by the touching 
effects of religion in the soul of a girl whose love, like the 
trees of the tropical forest, was always loaded with flowers 
and fruit, always fresh, and always fragrant. A beautiful life 
is more powerful than the most cogent arguments. It is 
impossible to resist the charm of -certain images. And 
the doctor’s eyes filled with tears, he knew not why, when he 
saw the child of his heart set out for church dressed in a 
frock of white gauze, with white satin shoes, graced with 
white ribbons, a fillet of white round her head tied on one 
side with a large bow, her hair rippling in a thousand 
waves over her pretty white shoulders, her bodice trimmed 
with a pleating mixed with narrow bows, her eyes shining 
like stars, from new hopes, loving her godfather all the 
more since her soul had risen to God. When he perceived 
the idea of eternity supplying nourishment to the soul 
hitherto wrapped in the darkness of childhood, as the sun 
brings life to the world after the night is past, he felt 
vexed to remain alone at home, still without knowing why. 
Seated on the balcony steps, his eyes remained long fixed on 
the bars of the gate through which his godchild had passed, 
saying, “ Why are you not coming too, godfather? Am I 
to be happy without you? ” 

Though shaken to the foundations, the encyclopedist’s 
pride did not once give way. However, he went out to 
look at the little procession, and saw his little Ursule 
radiant with exaltation under her veil. She flashed an 
inspired look at him, which struck to the stoniest corner 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


59 


of his heart, the spot closed against God. Still the deist 
was firm. “ Mummery ! ” he said to himself. “To imagine 
that if a Maker of worlds exists, such an Organizer of 
infinitude can trouble Himself about this foolish trumpery!” 

He laughed, and pursued his walk along the heights 
which overhang the road through the Gatinais, where the 
church bells, ringing loud peals, announced the gladness of 
many a home. 

The clatter of backgammon is intolerable to those who 
do not know the game, one of the most difficult that exist. 
Not to disturb his little girl — whose extreme delicacy of ear 
and nerves aid not allow of her enduring this rattle and their 
talk without apparent meaning — the cure, old Jordy during 
his lifetime, and Dr. Minoret postponed their game till the 
child was in bed or out walking. It often happened that it 
was unfinished when she came in again, and she then sub- 
mitted with the best possible grace, and sat down by the 
window to sew. She disliked the game, which at the begin- 
ning is no doubt dry and dull, to many minds repellent, and 
so difficult to master, that those who have not become accus- 
tomed to it in their youth find it almost impossible to learn 
in later life. 

Now on the evening after her first communion, when 
Ursule came back to her guardian and found him alone 
for that day, she set the backgammon board in front of 
the old man. 

“ Now whose throw will it be ? ” said she. 

“Ursule,” said the doctor, “is it not sinful to make 
game of your godfather on the very day of your first com- 
munion ? ” 

“I am not making game,” said she, seating herself. “I 
must think of your pleasure — you who are always thinking of 
mine. Whenever Monsieur Chaperon was pleased with me, 
he gave me a lesson in backgammon, and he has given me so 
many that I am prepared to beat you. You will not have tQ 

P 


60 


URSULE MIROUET. 


put yourself to inconvenience for me. I have conquered 
every difficulty, not to interfere with your amusement, and I 
really like the rattle of the dice.” 

Ursule won the game. The cure came in, taking them by 
surprise, and enjoyed her triumph. 

Next day Minoret, who had hitherto refused to allow the 
girl to learn music, went to Paris, bought a piano, and made 
arrangements with a mistress at Fontainebleau, submitting to 
the annoyance which Ursule’s constant practicing could not 
fail to cause him. One of his lost friend Jordy’s phrenolog-' 
ical prognostics proved true — the girl became an excellent 
musician. The doctor, proud of his god-daughter, now got 
an old German named Schmucke, a learned professor of music, 
to come from Paris once a week, and paid the cost of an art 
which he had at first contemned as perfectly useless in home 
life. Unbelievers do not love music, that heavenly language 
worked out by Catholicism, which found the names of the 
seven notes in one of its hymns. Each note is called by the 
first syllable of the seven first lines of the hymn to St. John. 

The impression produced on the old man by Ursule’s first 
communion, though vivid, was transient. The calm content- 
ment which acts of resolution and prayer diffused in her 
young soul were also examples of which he took no account. 
Minoret, having no subjects for remorse or repentance, 
enjoyed perfect serenity of mind. Doing all his acts of benev- 
olence without any hope of an eternal harvest, he thought 
himself superior to the Catholic, who, as he always said, was 
merely making a profitable bargain with God. 

“And yet,” the Abbe Chaperon would say, “if all men 
went in for this business, you must admit that society might 
be perfect. There would be no more misery. To be benev- 
olent on your lines, a man must be a great philosopher. You 
raise yourself to your principles by reason — you are a social 
exception ; now you need only be a Christian to be benevo- 
- lent on ours. With you it is an effort ) with us it is natural. ’* 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


61 


“ Which is as much as to say, cure, that I think and you 
feel. That is all.” 

Meanwhile, having reached the age of twelve, Ursule, 
whose womanly tact and shrewdness were brought into play 
by a superior education, and whose sense, now in its blossom, 
was enlightened by a religious spirit, fully understood that her 
godfather believed not in a future life, nor in the immortality 
of the soul, nor in Providence, nor in God. The doctor, 
pressed by her innocent questioning, found it impossible any 
longer to hide the terrible secret. Ursule’s naive consterna- 
tion at first made him smile ; but then, seeing that she was 
sometimes sad, he understood how great an affection this 
dejection revealed. Unqualified love has a horror of every 
kind of discord, even in things which have no connection 
with itself. The old man would sometimes lend himself, as to 
a caress, to the arguments of his adopted child, spoken in a 
gentle and tender voice, and the outcome of the most pure 
and ardent feeling. But believers and unbelievers speak two 
different languages, and cannot understand each other. The 
young girl in pleading the cause of God was hard upon her 
godfather, as a spoilt child is sometimes hard upon its 
mother. 

The cure gently reproved her, telling her that God reserved 
to Himself the power of humbling such proud spirits. The 
young girl answered the abbe by saying that David slew 
Goliath. These religious differences, these sorrows of the 
child who longed to lead her guardian to God, were the only 
griefs of their home-life, so simple and so full, and hidden 
from the gaze of the inquisitive little town. 

Ursule grew up and developed into the modest, Christianly 
trained maiden whom Desire had admired as she came out of 
church. The culture of the flowers in the garden, music, 
amusing her guardian and all the attentions she paid him — 
for Ursule had relieved La Bougival by taking care of the old 
man — all filled up the hours, days, and months of this tranquil 


32 


URSULE MIROUET. 


existence. For a year past, indeed, some little ailments of 
Ursule’s had made the doctor anxious; but they did not 
disturb him beyond making him watchful of her health. 
Meanwhile, however, the sagacious observer and experienced 
practitioner fancied he could discern that to her physical 
disorders there was some corresponding disturbance in her 
mind. He watched her with a mother’s eye, but, seeing no 
one in their circle worthy to inspire her with love, he made 
himself easy. 

Under these circumstances, just a month before the day 
when this drama had its beginning, an event occurred in the 
doctor’s intellectual life — one of those incidents which plough 
into the subsoil, so to speak, of our convictions, and turn up 
its very depths. But it will first be necessary to give a brief 
account of some facts of his medical career, which will also 
lend fresh interest to this narrative. 

At the end of the eighteenth century science was as deeply 
rent by the apparition of Mesmer as art was by that of Gluck. 
After his rediscovery of magnetism, Mesmer came to France, 
whither from time immemorial inventors have resorted to 
find protection for their discoveries. France, thanks to the 
lucidity of her language, is as it were the trumpeter of the 
world. 

“If homoeopathy gets to Paris, it is safe ! ” said Hahne- 
mann. 

“Go to France,” said Metternich to Gall, “and if they 
laugh at your ‘ bumps,’ you are a made man.” 

Mesmer, then, had his disciples and his antagonists, as 
ardent as the Piccinists against the Gluckists. Scientific 
France was stirred, and a serious debate was set on foot. 
Until judgment should be pronounced, the faculty of medi- 
cine, in a body, proscribed what they called Mesmer’s quack- 
ery, his tub, his conducting wires, and his theories. But it 
must be said that the German compromised his splendid dis~ 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


63 


covery by preposterous pecuniary demands. Mesrner failed 
through unproven facts, through his ignorance of the part 
played in nature by imponderable fluids not as yet investi- 
gated, and through his inability to study all sides of a science 
which has three aspects. Magnetism has more applications ; 
in Mesmer’s hands it was in relation to its future develop- 
ment what a principle is to results. But though the discoverer 
lacked genius, it is sad for human reason and for France to 
have to own that a science contemporaneous with the earliest 
civilization, cultivated in Egypt and Chaldea, in Greece and 
in India, met in Paris at the high-tide of the eighteenth cen- 
tury with the same fate as the truth embodied in Galileo in 
the sixteenth ; and that magnetism was put out of court by 
the twofold attainder of religious believers and of materi- 
alist philosophers, both equally alarmed. Magnetism, the 
favorite science of Jesus, and one of the powers conferred on 
the apostles, seems to have been as little recognized by the 
church as by the followers of Jean- Jacques and Voltaire, of 
Locke and Condillac. Neither the encyclopedia nor the 
priesthood could come to terms with this ancient human force 
which seemed to them so novel. The miracles of the convul- 
sionnaires were smothered by the church and by the indiffer- 
ence of the learned, in spite of the valuable works of Carre de 
Montgeron ; still, they were the first summons to make ex- 
periments on the fluids in the human body which supply the 
power of calling up enough spontaneous forces to nullify the 
pain caused by an external agency. But it would have neces- 
sitated the recognition of fluids that are intangible, invisible, 
and imponderable, the three negations which science at that 
time regarded as the definition of a vacuum. 

To modern science a vacuum is impossible. Given ten feet 
of vacuum, and the world is in ruins ! To materialists espe- 
cially the world is absolutely full, everything is closely linked 
and connected, and acts mechanically. 

“The world, ” said Diderot, “as a result of mere change 


64 


URSULE MIROUET. 


is more intelligible than God. The multiplicity of causes, 
and the immeasurable number of throws that chance presup- 
poses, sufficiently account for creation. Given the ‘./Eneid’ 
and all the letters necessary to set it up, if you grant me time 
and space, by dint of tossing the letters, I should bring out 
the combination forming the ‘uEneid.’” These wretched 
men, who would deify everything rather than confess a God, 
shrank no less from the infinite divisibility of matter which is 
implied in the nature of an imponderable force. Locke and 
Condillac at that time delayed by fifty years the immense 
advance which natural science is now making under the con- 
ception of unity which we owe to the great Geoffroy Saint- 
Hilaire. 

Some honest minds, devoid of system, convinced by the 
facts they had conscientiously studied, persisted in holding 
the doctrine of Mesmer, who discerned the existence in man 
of a penetrating influence, giving one individual power over 
another, and brought into play by the will ; an influence 
which is curative when the fluid is abundant, and which acts 
as a duel between two wills — the evil to be cured and the 
will to cure it. The phenomena of somnambulism, hardly 
suspected by Mesmer, were detected by MM. de Puysegur 
and Deleuze ; but the Revolution brought a pause in these 
discoveries, which left the men of learning and the scoffers in 
possession of the field. 

Among the small number of believers were some physi- 
cians ; these seceders were persecuted by their brethren till 
the day of their death. The respectable faculty of doctors in 
Paris turned against the Mesmerists with all the rigor of a 
religious warfare, and were as cruel in their hatred as it was 
possible to be in a period of Voltairean tolerance. The 
orthodox physicians refused to meet in consultation with those 
who adhered to the Mesmerian heresy. In 1820, these re- 
puted heresiarchs were still the object of this unformulated 
proscription. The disasters and storms of the Revolution did 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


65 


not extinguish this scientific hostility. None but priests, 
lawyers, and physicians can hate in this way. The “gown” 
is always terrible. But are not ideas certain to be more 
implacable than things? Doctor Bouvard, a friend of Min- 
oret, accepted the new creed, and to his dying day persisted 
in the scientific faith to which he sacrificed the peace of his 
whole life — for he was the pet aversion of the Paris faculty. 
Minoret, one of the bravest supporters of the encyclopedists, 
and the most redoubtable adversary of Deslon, Mesmer’s 
chief disciple, since his pen had great weight in this dispute, 
quarreled beyond remedy with his old comrade; he did 
worse, he persecuted him. His behavior to Bouvard must 
have caused him the only repentance that can have clouded 
the serenity of his declining life. 

Since Doctor Minoret’s retirement to Nemours, the science 
of imponderable agents — the only name applicable to magnet- 
ism of which the phenomena ally it so closely with electric- 
ity and light — had made immense progress, in spite of the 
unfailing mockery of the Paris world of science. Phrenology 
and physiognomy, the sciences of Gall and Lavater, twins, of 
which one is to the other as cause to effect, demonstrated to 
the eyes of more than one physiologist certain traces of the 
intangible fluid which is the basis of the phenomena of human 
will, giving rise to passions and habits, to the forms of the 
features and of the skull. Magnetic facts too, the miracles of 
somnambulism, and those of divination and ecstasy, allowing 
us to enter into the world of spirit, were multiplying. The 
strange tale of the apparitions seen by Martin, a farmer, 
which were amply proved, and. that peasant’s interview with 
Louis XVIII.; the statements as to Swedenborg’s intercourse 
with the dead, seriously accepted in Germany ; Walter Scott’s 
narratives of the results of second-sight ; the amazing facul- 
ties displayed by some fortune-tellers, who combined into one 
science chiromancy, card-reading, and horoscopy ; the facts 
of catalepsy, and of the peculiar action of the diaphragm 
5 


66 


URSULE MIROUET. 

under certain morbid influences ; all these phenomena, curi- 
ous, to say the least, and all emanating from the same source, 
undermined much doubt, and led the most indifferent into the 
province of experiment. Minoret knew nothing of this 
movement of mind, vast in Northern Europe, though still 
small in France, where, nevertheless, certain facts occurred 
which superficial observers called marvelous, but which fell 
like stones to the bottom of the sea in the whirlpool of events 
in Paris. 

At the beginning of this year the anti-mesmerist was greatly 
disturbed by receiving the following letter : 

“ My old Comrade : — Every friendship, even a lost friend- 
ship, has rights which it is not easy to set aside. I know that 
you are still alive, and I remember less of our hostilities than 
of our happy days in the little dens of Saint-Julien-le-pauvre. 
Now that I am about to quit this world, I cling to a hope of 
proving to you that magnetism is destined to be one of the 
most important of sciences — unless, indeed all science should 
not be regarded as one. I can wreck your incredulity by posi- 
tive proofs. Perhaps I may gain from your curiosity the 
happiness of once more clasping your hand as we used to 
clasp hands before the days of Mesmer. Always yours, 

“ Bouvard.” 

The anti-mesmerist, stung as a lion by a gadfly, rushed off 
to Paris and left his card on old Bouvard, who lived in the 
Rue Ferou, near Saint Sulpice. Bouvard sent a card to his 
hotel, writing on it, “ To-morrow at nine o’clock, Rue St, 
Honore, opposite the Church of the Assumption.” 

Minoret, grown young again, did not sleep. He went to 
call on the old physicians of his acquaintance, and asked 
them if the world were turned upside down, if there were 
still a school of medicine, and if the four faculties still existed. 
The doctors reassured him by telling him that the old spirit 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


67 


of resistance still survived ; only, instead of persecuting the 
new science, the academies of medicine and of sciences 
roared with laughter, and classed magnetic demonstrations 
with the tricks of Comus, Comte, and Bosco, as jugglery, 
sleight-of-hand, and what is known as amusing physics. 

These speeches did not hinder Minoret from going to the 
rendezvous appointed by old Bouvard. After forty-four years 
of alienation the antagonists met again under a courtyard 
gate in the Rue St. Honore. 

Frenchmen live in too constant a change to hate each other 
very long. In Paris, especially, events expand space and 
make life so wide — in politics, in science, and in literature — 
that men cannot fail to find countries in it to conquer where 
their demands find room to dwell and rule. Hatred requires 
so many forces always in arms that those who mean to hate 
persistently begin with a good supply. And then, only bodies 
of men can bear it in mind. At the end of forty-four years 
Robespierre and Danton would fall on each other’s neck. 

Neither of the two doctors, however, offered to shake 
hands. Bouvard was the first to say to Minoret (with the 
familiar tu of French good-fellowship) — 

“ You are looking very well.” 

“Yes, not so badly; and you?” said Minoret, the ice 
being broken. 

“ I — as you see me.” 

“ Has magnetism kept you from dying? ” asked Minoret in 
a bantering tone, but not bitterly. 

“ No ; but it has almost kept me from living.” 

“You are not rich then ?” said Minoret. 

“ Rich ? ” said Bouvard. 

“ Well, but I am rich ! ” cried Minoret. 

“ It is not your fortune, but your conviction, that I aim at. 
Come,” replied Bouvard. 

“ Obstinate fellow ! ” exclaimed Minoret. 

The believer in Mesmer led his incredulous friend into a 


68 URS UL E MIR O Ut T. 

dark stairway, and made him mount cautiously to the fourth 
floor. 

At this time there was in Paris an extraordinary man en- 
dowed by faith with stupendous powers, and a master of mag- 
netic forces in every form of their application. Not only 
did this great unknown, who is still living, cure unaided, and 
at any distance, the most painful and inveterate diseases — cure 
them suddenly and radically, as of old did the Redeemer of 
man — but he also could produce at any moment the most 
curious phenomena of somnambulism by quelling the most 
refractory wills. The countenance of the unknown, who, like 
Swedenborg, declares himself to be commissioned by God 
and in communion with the angels, is that of a lion ; it is 
radiant with concentrated and irresistible energy. His feat- 
ures, of a singular cast, have a terrible and overwhelming 
power; his voice, coming from the depths of his being, seems 
charged with magnetic fluid, and enters the listener by every 
pore. 

Disgusted with the ingratitude of the public after thousands 
of cures, he had thrown himself into unapproachable solitude, 
voluntary annihilation. His all-powerful hand, which has 
restored dying daughters to their mothers, fathers to their 
weeping children, adored mistresses to lovers crazed with 
love ; which has cured the sick when physicians have given 
them over, and caused thanksgivings to be sung in the syna- 
gogue, in the conventicle, and in the church by priests of 
different creeds, all brought to the same God by the same 
miracle ; which has mitigated the agony of death to those for 
whom life was no longer possible — that sovereign hand, the 
sun of life which dazzled the closed eyes of the sleep-walker, 
he now would not lift to restore the heir of a kingdom to a 
queen. V/ rapped in the memory of the good he has done as 
in a luminous shroud he has shut his door on the world, and 
dwells in the skies. 

But, in the early days of his reign, almost startled by his 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


69 


own powers, this man, whose disinterestedness was as great as 
his influence, allowed a few inquirers to witness his miracles. 
The rumor of his fame, which had been immense, and which 
might revive any day, aroused Doctor Bouvard on the brink 
of the tomb. The persecuted believer in Mesmer could at last 
behold the most brilliant manifestation of the science he 
cherished, like a treasure, in his heart. The old man’s mis- 
fortunes had touched the great unknown, who granted him 
certain privileges. So Bouvard, as they climbed the stairs, 
took his old adversary’s banter with malicious satisfaction. 
He made no reply but, “ You will see, you will see,” with 
the little tosses of the head that mark a man sure of his case. 

The two doctors entered a suite of rooms of the plainest 
simplicity. Bouvard went to speak with the master for a 
moment in a bedroom adjoining the drawing-room, where he 
left Minoret, whose distrust was now aroused. But Bouvard 
immediately came back, and led him into the bedroom, where 
he found the famous Swedenborgian with a woman seated in 
an armchair. The woman did not rise, and seemed not to 
observe the arrival of the two old men. 

“ What, no tub?” said Minoret, with a smile. 

“Nothing but the power of God,” gravely replied the 
Swedenborgian, whom Minoret supposed to be a man of about 
fifty. 

The three men sat down, and the stranger made conversa- 
tion. They spoke of the weather and indifferent matters, to 
old Minoret’s great surprise; he fancied he was being fooled. 
The Swedenborgian questioned his visitor as to his scientific 
views, and was evidently taking time to study him. 

“You have come here out of pure curiosity, monsieur,” he 
said at length. “I am not in the habit of prostituting a 
power which, it is my full conviction, emanates from God ; 
if I made a frivolous or evil use of it, it might be taken from 
me. However, Monsieur Bouvard tells me our aim is to be 
the conversion of an opinion antagonistic to ours, and the 


70 


URSULE M1ROUET. 


enlightenment of a man of learning and good faith. I shall 
therefore satisfy you. The woman, you see there,” he went 
on, pointing to the armchair, “ is in a magnetic sleep. From 
the accounts and revelations of all such somnambulists, the 
state is one of great beatitude, during which the inner being, 
set free from the fetters by which visible nature hinders the 
full exercise of its faculties, wanders through the world which 
we erroneously call invisible. Sight and hearing are then far 
more perfectly active than in the state which we call being 
awake, and independent, perhaps, of the medium of those 
organs which are but as a sheath to the blades of light that 
we call sight and hearing. To a man in that condition dis- 
tance and material obstacles have ceased to exist, or are 
pierced through by an internal vitality of which our body is 
the container, the necessary fulcrum, a mere wrapper. Terms 
are lacking for results so recently rediscovered ; for the words 
imponderable, intangible, invisible have no meaning in rela- 
tion to the fluid whose action is perceptible through magnet- 
ism. Light is ponderable by heat, which, when it penetrates 
a body, increases its volume; and electricity is only too tangi- 
ble. We have passed judgment on things instead of blaming 
the imperfection of our instruments.” 

“ She is asleep?” asked Minoret, examining the woman, 
who seemed to him of the lower class. 

“ Her body is in a certain sense annihilated,” replied the 
Swedenborgian. “Ignorant persons mistake this state for 
sleep. But she will prove to you that there is a spiritual 
world, where the spirit does not obey the laws of the physical 
universe. I will send her to any region whither you may 
choose that she shall go, twenty leagues away, or as far as 
China; she will tell you what is happening there.” 

“ Send her only to my house at Nemours,” replied Minoret. 

“I will not interfere between you,” said the mysterious 
man. “ Give me your hand ; you shall be at once actor and 
spectator, cause and effect.” 







HE TOOK MINORET’S 
HE TOOK THAT 


HAND AND WITH HIS OTHER HAND 

OF THE WOMAN IN THE CHAIR. 













































THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


71 


He took Minoret’s hand, Minoret yielding ; he held it for 
a minute with an apparent concentration of thought, and with 
his other hand he took that of the woman in the chair ; then 
he placed the doctor’s hand in the woman’s, signing to the 
old skeptic to sit down by the side of this Pythoness without 
a tripod. Minoret observed a slight thrill in the excessively 
calm face of the woman when the Swedenborgian placed them 
in contact ; but the movement, though marvelous in its re- 
sults, was in itself extremely simple. 

“Obey this gentleman,’’ said the unknown, extending his 
hand over the head of the woman, who seemed to inhale light 
and life from him. “ And remember that all you do for him 
will please me. Now, you can speak to her,” he said to 
Minoret. 

“Go to Nemours, Rue des Bourgeois, to my house,” said 
the doctor. 

“ Give her time; hold her hand till she shows by what she 
says that she is there,” said Bouvard to his old friend. 

“I see a river,” replied the woman in a low voice, and 
seeming to be looking attentively within herself, in spite of 
her closed eyes. “ I see a pretty garden.” 

“Why have you begun by the river and the garden?” 
asked Minoret. 

“ Because they are in the garden.” 

“Who?” 

“ The young lady and her nurse, of whom you are think- 

• y y 

ing. 

“ What is the garden like? ” asked Minoret. 

“ As you go into it by the steps that lead to the river there 
is a long gallery to the right, built of brick, in which I see 
books, and at the end there is a little gazebo trimmed up with 
wooden bells and red eggs. The wall on the left is covered 
with creepers — Virginia creeper and yellow jasmine. There 
is a little sun-dial in the middle ; there are a great many pots 
of flowers. Your ward is looking at the flowers and showing 


72 URSULE MIROUET. 

them to her nurse ; she makes holes with a dibble and sows 
some seeds. The nurse is raking the path. Though the girl 
is as pure as an angel, there is a dawning of love in her, as 
faint as the first light of morning.” 

“For whom?” asked the doctor, who had so far heard 
nothing that any one might not have told him without being 
a clairvoyant. He still believed it was a trick. 

“ You know nothing of it, though you were somewhat anx- 
ious not long since as she grew up,” said the woman, smiling. 
“The instincts of her heart followed the development of her 
nature.” 

“And it is quite a common woman who speaks thus?” 
exclaimed the old doctor. 

“In this state they all speak with peculiar -lucidity,” re- 
plied Bouvard. 

“ But who is it that Ursule loves? ” 

“ Ursule does not know that she is in love,” answered the 
woman, with a little shake of her head. “ She is too angel- 
ically innocent to be conscious of desire, or of love in any 
kind ; but she wonders over him, she thinks of him ; she 
even forbids herself to do so, and returns in spite of her 
determination to avoid it. Now she is at the piano ” 

“ But who is he ?” 

“ The son of the lady who lives opposite.” 

“ Madame de Portendu£re ? ” 

“ Portenduere, did you say?” replied the clairvoyant. 
“ I daresay. But there is no danger; he is not at home? ” 

“ Have they ever spoken to each other? ” 

“ Never. They have looked at each other. She thinks 
him charming. And he really is very good-looking, and he 
has a good heart. She has watched him out of her window, 
and they have seen each other at church ; but the young man 
thinks no more about it.” 

“ What is his name ? ” 

“I cannot tell you unless I should read it or hear it 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


73 


His name is Savinien ; she has just spoken it ; she likes the 
sound of it ; she had looked in the calendar for his saint’s 
day, and had marked it with a tiny red spot. Childish ! Oh, 
she will love very truly, and with a love as pure as it is strong. 
She is not the girl to love twice ; love will color her whole 
soul, and fill it so completely, that she will reject every other 
feeling.” 

O 

“ Where do you see that ? ” 

“I sec it in her. She will know how to bear suffering ; 
she has inherited that power, for her father and mother suffered 
much.” 

The last words overset the doctor, who was surprised rather 
than shaken. It is desirable to note that ten or fifteen min- 
utes passed between each of the woman’s statements; during 
these her attention became more and more self-centred. He 
could see that she saw ! Her brow showed peculiar changes ; 
internal effort was to be seen there; it cleared or was knit by 
a power whose effects Minoret had never seen but in dying 
people at the moment when the prophetic spirit is upon them. 
She not unfrequently made gestures reminding him of Ursule. 

“ Oh, question her,” said the mysterious master to Minoret. 
“ She will tell you secrets that none but yourself can know.” 

11 Does Ursule love me?” said Minoret. 

“ Almost as she loves God,” replied the sleeper, with a 
smile. “ And she is very unhappy about your infidelity. You 
do not believe in God, as if you could hinder His being ! 
His voice fills the world ! And so you are the cause of the 
poor child’s only distress. There ! she is playing her scales ; 
she wishes to be a better musician than she is, and is vexed 
with herself. What she thinks is: * If I only could sing 
well, if I had a fine voice, when he was at his mother’s il 
would be sure to reach his ears ! ’ 

Doctor Minoret took out a note-book and wrote down the 
exact hour. 

“ Can you tell me what seeds she has sown ? ” 


URSULE MIR O C/E T 


74 

“ Mignonette, sweet peas, balsams - n 

“ And lastly ? ” 

“ Larkspur.” 

“ Where is my money? ” 

“ At your lawyer’s; but you invest as it comes in without 
losing a day’s interest.” 

“ Yes ; but where is the money I keep at home for the half- 
yearly housekeeping? ” 

“You keep it in a large book bound in red, called f The 
Pandects of Justinian,’ vol. ii. , between the two last pages; 
the book is above the sideboard with glass doors, in the divi- 
sion for folios. There is a whole row of them. The money 
is in the last volume at the end next the drawing-room. By 
the way, vol. iii. is placed before vol. ii. But it is not money 
—it is in ” 

“ Thousand franc notes?” asked the doctor. 

“ I cannot see clearly ; they are folded up. No, there are 
two notes for five hundred francs each.” 

“ You can see them ? ” 

“Yes.” 

“ What are they like? ” 

“One is old, and very yellow; the other is white, and 
almost new.” 

This last part of the interview left Doctor Minoret thunder- 
struck. He looked at Bouvard in blank amazement ; but 
Bouvard and the Swedenborgian, who were accustomed to 
the astonishment of skeptics, were conversing in an undertone, 
without showing any surprise or amazement. 

Minoret begged them to allow him to return after dinner. 
The anti-mesmerist wanted to think it over, to shake off his 
extreme terror, so as to test once more this immense power, to 
submit it to some decisive experiment, and ask some questions 
which, if answered, could leave no shadow of a doubt. 

“Be here by nine o’clock,” said the unknown. “I shall 
be at your service.” 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM 


75 


Minoret was so violently agitated that he went away with- 
out taking leave, followed by Bouvard, who called after him — 

“Well? Well?” 

“I believe I am mad,” replied Minoret, as they reached 
the outer door. “If that woman has told the truth about 
Ursule, as there is no one on earth but Ursule who can know 
what the sorceress has revealed — you are right. I only wish I 
had wings to fly to Nemours and verify her statements. But 
I will hire a post-chaise and start at ten this evening. Oh ! I 
am going crazy ! ” 

“What would you think, then, if you had known a man 
incurable for years made perfectly well in five seconds ; if you 
could see that great magnetizer make a leper sweat profusely ; 
or make a crippled woman walk? ” 

“Let us dine together, Bouvard, and stay with me till nine 
o’clock. I want to devise some decisive and irrefutable test.” 

“ Certainly, old friend,” replied the Mesmerian doctor. 

The reconciled enemies went to dine at the Palais Royal. 
After an eager conversation, which helped Minoret to escape 
from the turmoil of ideas that racked his brain, Bouvard said 
to him — 

“If you discern in this woman a real power to annihilate 
space, if you can but convince yourself that she, here, from 
the Church of the Assumption, can see and hear what is going 
on at Nemours, you must then admit all other effects of mag- 
netism ; they are to a skeptic quite as impossible as these. 
Ask her, therefore, one single proof that may satisfy you, for 
you may imagine that we have procured all this information. 
But we cannot possibly know, for instance, what will happen 
this evening at nine o’clock in your house, in your ward’s 
bedroom. Remember or write down exactly what the clair- 
voyant may tell you, and hasten home. Little Ursule, whom 
I never saw, is not our accomplice ; and, if she shall have 
done or said what you will have written down, bow thy head, 
proud infidel ! ” 


76 


URSULE MIROUET. 


The two friends returned to the Swedenborgian’s rooms, 
and there found the woman, who did not recognize Doctor 
Minoret. Her eyes gently closed under the hand which the 
master stretched out to her from afar, and she sank into the 
attitude in which Minoret had seen her before dinner. When 
his hand and hers were placed in connection he desired her 
to tell him all that was happening in his house at Nemours at 
that moment. 

“What is Ursule doing?” he asked. 

“ She is in her dressing-gown ; she has finished putting in 
her curl-papers ; she is kneeling on her prie-Dieu in front of 
an ivory crucifix fastened on to a panel of red velvet.” 

“ What is she saying ? ” 

“Her evening prayers; she commends herself to God; 
she beseeches Him to keep her soul free from evil thoughts ; 
she examines her conscience, going over all she has done 
during the day to see whether she has failed in obedience to 
His commandments or those of the church ; she is stripping 
her heart bare, poor dear little thing.” There were tears in 
the clairvoyant’s eyes. “ She has committed no sin ; but 
she blames herself for having thought too much of Monsieur 
Savinien,” she went on. “ She stops to wonder what he is 
doing in Paris, and prays to God to make him happy. She 
ends with you, and says a prayer aloud.” 

“ Can you repeat it ? ” 

“Yes.” 

Minoret took out his pencil and wrote at the woman’s 
dictation the following prayer, evidently composed by the 
Abbe Chaperon — 

“‘O God, if Thou art pleased with Thy handmaid, who 
adores Thee and beseeches Thee with all love and fervor, 
who strives not to wander from Thy holy commandments, 
who would gladly die, as Thy Son died, to glorify Thy name, 
who would fain live under Thy shadow, Thou to whom all 
hearts are open, grant me the mercy that my godfather’s eyes 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


77 


may be unsealed, lead him into the way of life, and give him 
Thy grace, that he may dwell in Thee during his latter days; 
preserve him from all ill, and let me suffer in his stead ! 
Holy Saint Ursule, my beloved patron saint, and thou, 
mother of God, queen of heaven, archangels, and saints in 
paradise, hear me ; join your intercessions to mine, and have 
pity on us ! ’ ” 

The clairvoyant so exactly imitated the child’s innocent 
gestures and saintly aspirations that Doctor Minoret’s eyes 
filled with tears. 

“ Does she say anything more ?” he asked. 

“ Yes.” 

“ Repeat it.” 

11 ‘ Dear godfather ! Whom will he play backgammon 
with in Paris ? ’ She has blown out her light, lays down her 
head, and goes to sleep. She is gone off! She looks so 
pretty in her little night-cap ! ” 

Minoret took leave of the great unknown, shook hands with 
Bouvard, ran downstairs, and hurried off to a stand of coaches, 
which at that time existed under the gateway of a mansion 
since demolished to make way for the Rue d’Alger. He 
there found a driver, and asked him if he would set out forth- 
with for Fontainebleau. The price having been agreed on, 
the old man, made young again, set out that very minute. 
As agreed, he let the horse rest at Essonne, then drove on till 
they picked up the Nemours diligence, and dismissed his 
coachman. 

He reached home by about five in the morning, and went 
to bed amid the wreck of all his former notions of physiology, 
of nature, and of metaphysics ; and he slept till nine, he was 
so tired by his expedition. 

On waking, the doctor, quite sure that no one had crossed 
the threshold since his return, proceeded to verify the facts, 
not without an invincible dread. He himself had forgotten 
the difference between the two bank-notes, and the displace- 


78 


URSULE MIR O VET 


ment of the two volumes of “The Pandects." The somnam- 
bulist had seen rightly. He rang for La Bougival. 

“Tell Ursule to come to speak to me," said he, sitting 
down in the middle of the library. 

The girl came at once, flew to his side, and kissed him ; 
the doctor took her on his knee, where, as she sat, her fine fair 
tresses mingled with her godfather’s white hair. 

“ You have something to say to me, godfather ? " 

“Yes. But promise me, on your soul, to reply frankly, 
unequivocally, to my questions." 

Ursule blushed to the roots of her hair. 

“ Oh ! I will ask you nothing that you cannot answer," he 
went on, seeing the bashfulness of first love clouding the 
hitherto childlike clearness of her lovely eyes. 

“Speak, godfather." 

“ With what thought did you end your evening prayers last 
night ; and at what hour did you say them ? " 

“ It was a quarter-past nine, or half-past." 

“ Well, repeat now your last prayer." 

The young girl hoped that her voice might communicate 
her faith to the unbeliever ; she rose, knelt down, and clasped 
her hands fervently ; a radiant look beamed in her face, she 
glanced at the old man, and said — 

“What I asked of God last night I prayed for again this 
morning, and shall still ask till He grants it me." 

Then she repeated the prayer with fresh and emphatic 
expression ; but, to her great surprise, her godfather inter- 
rupted her, ending it himself. 

“ Well, Ursule," said the doctor, drawing her on to his 
knees again, “ and as you went to sleep with your head on the 
pillow, did you not say, ‘ Dear godfather ! Whom will he 
play backgammon with in Paris?’ " 

Ursule started to her feet as though the trump of judgment 
had sounded in her ears ; she gave a cry of terror ; her 
dilated eyes stared at the old man with fixed horror. 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


79 


“ Who are you, godfather ? Where did you get such a 
power?” she asked, fancying that as he did not believe in 
God, lie must have made a compact with the angel of hell. 

“ What did you sow in the garden yesterday? ” 

“ Mignonette, sweet peas, balsams ” 

“And larkspurs to end with?” 

She fell on her knees. 

“ Do not terrify me, godfather ! But you were here, were 
you not ? ” 

“Am I not always with you? ” replied the doctor in jest, 
to spare the innocent child’s reason. 

“ Let us go to your room.” Then he gave her his arm and 
went upstairs. 

“Your knees are quaking, godfather,” said she. 

“Yes; I feel quite overset.” 

“Do you at last believe in God?” she exclaimed, with 
innocent gladness, though the tears rose to her eyes. 

The old man looked round the neat and simple room he 
had arranged for Ursule. On the floor was an inexpensive 
green drugget, which she kept exquisitely clean ; on the walls 
a paper with a pale-gray ground and a pattern of roses with 
their green leaves ; there were white cotton curtains, with a 
pink border, to the windows looking on the courtyard ; be- 
tween the windows, below a tall mirror, a console of gilt 
wood with a marble slab, on which stood a blue Sevres vase 
for flowers ; and opposite the fireplace a pretty inlaid chest 
of drawers with a top of fine marble. The bed, furnished 
with old chintz, and chintz curtains lined with pink, was one 
Of the old duchesse four-post beds which were common in the 
eighteenth century, ornamented with a capital of carved 
feathers to each of the fluted columns at the corners. On 
the chimney-shelf was an old clock, mounted in a sort of 
catafalque of tortoise-shell inlaid with ivory; the marble 
chimney-piece and candelabra, the glass, and the pier, painted 
in shades of gray, had a remarkably good effect of tone, color, 


80 


URSULE MIROUET. 


and style. A large wardrobe, the doors inlaid with land- 
scapes in various kinds of wood, some of them of greenish 
tint, hardly to be met with in these days, no doubt contained 
her linen and her dresses. 

The atmosphere of this room had a fragrance as of heaven. 
The careful arrangement of everything indicated a spirit of 
order, a feeling for the harmony of things, that would have 
struck any one, even a Minoret-Levrault. It was, above all, 
easy to see how dear to Ursule were the things about her, and 
how fond she was of the room which was, so to speak, part 
of all her life as a child and a young girl. 

While looking round at it all as an excuse, the guardian 
convinced himself that from her window Ursule could see 
across to Madame de Portenduere’s house. During the night 
he had considered the line of conduct to be taken with regard 
to the secret he had discovered of her budding passion. To 
question his ward would compromise him in her eyes ; for 
either he must approve or disapprove of her love ; in either 
case he would be awkwardly situated. He had therefore de- 
termined that he would study for himself the relations of 
young Portenduere and Ursule, to decide whether he should 
try to counteract her inclination before it had become irre- 
sistible. Only an old man could show so much prudence. 
Still gasping under the shock of finding the magnetic revela- 
tions true, he turned about, examining the smallest things in 
the room, for he wished to glance at the almanac which hung 
by a corner of the chimney-piece. 

“ These clumsy candlesticks are too heavy for your pretty 
little hands,” he said, taking up the marble candlesticks, 
ornamented with brass. 

He weighed them in his hands, looked at the almanac, 
unhooked it, and said — 

“ This, too, seems to me very ugly. Why do you hang 
this common calendar in such a pretty room? ” 

“ Oh, leave me that, godfather ! ” 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


81 


<l No, no j you shall have another to-morrow.” 

He went downstairs again, carrying away the convicting 
document, shut himself into his room, looked for Saint 
Savinien, and found, as the clairvoyant had said, a small red 
dot at the 19th of October; he found such another at Saint 
Denis’ day, his own patron saint ; and at Saint John’s day— 
that of the cure. And this dot, as large as a pin’s head, the 
sleeping woman had discerned in spite of distance and obsta- 
cles. The old man meditated till dusk on all these facts, 
more stupendous to him than to any other man. He was 
forced to yield to evidence. A thick wall, within himself, as 
it were, crumbled down ; for he had lived on the double 
foundation of his indifference to religion and his denial of 
magnetism. By proving that the senses — a purely physical 
structure, mere organs whose effects can all be explained — 
were conterminous with some of the attributes of infinity, 
magnetism overthrew, or at any rate seemed to him to over- 
throw, Spinoza’s powerful logic : The finite and the infinite, 
two elements which, according to that great man, are incom- 
patible, existed one in the other. However great the power 
he could conceive of the divisibility and mobility of matter, 
he could not credit it with almost divine characters. And he 
was too old to connect these phenomena with a system, to 
compare them with those of sleep, of vision, or of light. All 
his scientific theory, based on the statements of the school of 
Locke and Condillac, lay in ruins. On seeing his hollow 
idols wrecked, his incredulity naturally was shaken. Hence 
all the advantages in this struggle between Catholic youth and 
Voltairean old age was certain to be on Ursule’s side. A 
beam of light fell on the dismantled fortress in ruins ; from 
the depths of the wreckage rose the cry of prayer. 

And yet the stiff-necked old man tried to dispute his own 
doubts. Though stricken to the heart, he could not make up 
his mind ; he still strove with God. At the same time his 
mind seemed to vacillate; he was not the same man. He 
6 


82 


URSULE MIROUET 


became unnaturally pensive; he read the “Pensees” of 
Pascal, Bossuet’s sublime “ Histoire des Variations;” he 
studied Bonald ; he read Saint Augustine ; he also read 
through the works of Swedenborg and of the deceased Saint- 
Martin, of whom the mysterious stranger had spoken. The 
structure raised in this man by materialism was splitting on 
all sides ; a shock alone was needed ; and when his heart was 
ripe for God, it fell into the heavenly vineyard as fruits drop. 
Several times already in the evening, when playing his game 
with the priest, his goddaughter sitting by, he had asked 
questions which, in view of his opinions, struck the Abbe 
Chaperon as strange ; for as yet he knew not of the mo.ral 
travail by which God was rectifying this noble conscience. 

“Do you believe in apparitions?” the infidel suddenly 
asked his pastor, pausing in his game. 

“ Cardain, a great philosopher of the sixteenth century, 
said that he had seen some,” replied the cure. 

“I know of all those that the philosophers have seen; I 
have just re-read Plotinus. At this moment I ask you as a 
Catholic : I want to know whether you think that a dead 
man can return to visit the living.” 

“Well, Jesus appeared to His apostles after His death,” 
replied the priest. “ The church must believe in the apparition 
of our Lord. As to miracles, there is no lack of them,” 
added the Abbe Chaperon with a smile. “Would you like 
to hear of the latest ? Some were wrought in the eighteenth 
century.” 

“ Pooh ! ” 

“Yes; the blessed Maria-Alphonzo de Liguori knew of 
the pope’s death when he was far from Rome, at the moment 
when the holy father expired, and there were many witnesses 
to the miracle. The reverend bishop, in a trance, heard the 
pontiffs last words, and repeated them to several persons. 
The messenger bringing the news did not arrive till thirty 
hours later ” 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


83 


“ Jesuit ! ” said Minoret with a smile ; “ I do not ask you 
for proofs ; I ask you whether you believe it.” 

“ I believe that the apparition depends greatly on the 
person seeing it,” said the cure, still laughing at the skeptic. 

“ My dear friend, I am not laying a trap for you. What is 
your belief on this point?” 

“I believe that the power of God is infinite,” replied the 
abb6. 

‘‘When I die, if I am at peace with God, I will entreat 
Him to let me appear to you,” said the doctor, laughing. 

“That is precisely the agreement made by Cardan with his 
friend,” replied the cure. 

“ Ursule,” said Minoret, “ if ever a danger should threaten 
you, call me — I would come.” 

“ You have just put into simple words the touching elegy 
called ‘ Neere,’ by Andre Chenier,” replied the cure. “But 
poets are great only because they know how to embody facts 
or feelings in perennially living forms.” 

“Why do you talk of dying, my dear godfather?” said 
the young girl sadly. “ We shall not die, we who are Chris- 
tians ; the grave is but the cradle of the soul.” 

“ Well, well,” said the doctor with a smile, “ we are bound 
to quit this world ; and when I am no more, you will be very 
much astonished at your fortune.” 

“ When you are no more, my kind godfather, my only con- 
solation will be to devote my life to you.” • 

“ To me — when I am dead ? ” 

“ Yes. All the good works I may be able to do shall be 
done in your name to redeem your errors. I will pray to 
God day by day to persuade His infinite mercy not to punish 
eternally the faults of a day, but to give a place near to Him- 
self among the spirits of the blest to a soul so noble and so 
pure as yours.” 

This reply, spoken with angelic candor and in a tone of 
absolute conviction, confounded error and converted Doctor 


84 


URSULE MIR CUE T. 

Minoret like another Saint Paul. A flash of internal light 
stunned him, and at the*same time this tenderness, extending 
even to the life to come, brought tears to his eyes. This sud- 
den effect of grace was almost electrical, The cure clasped 
his hands and stood up in his agitation. The child herself, 
surprised at her success, shed tears. The old man drew him- 
self up as though some one had called him, looked into space 
as if he saw an aurora ; then he knelt on his armchair, folded 
his hands, and cast down his eyes in deep humiliation. 

“ Great God ! ” he said, in a broken voice, and looking up 
to heaven, “ if anyone can obtain my forgiveness, and lead 
me to Thee, is it not this spotless creature? Pardon my 
repentant old age, presented to Thee by this glorious child ! ” 

He lifted up his soul in silence to God, beseeching Him to 
enlighten him by knowledge after having overwhelmed him 
by grace; then, turning to the cure, he held out his hand, 
saying — 

“ My dear father in God, I am a little child again.. I am 
yours ; I give my soul into your hands.’ ’ 

Ursule kissed her godfather’s hands, covering them with 
tears of joy. The old man took her on his knee, gaily calling 
her his godmother. The cure, much moved, recited the 
Veni Creator in a sort of religious transport. This hymn was 
their evening prayer as the three Christians knelt together. 

“What has happened?” asked La Bougival in astonish- 
ment. 

“At last my godfather believes in God ! ” cried Ursule. 

“ And a good thing too ; that was all that was wanting to 
make him perfect ! ” exclaimed the old peasant-woman, cross- 
ing herself with simple gravity. 

“My dear doctor,” said the good priest, “you will soon 
have mastered the grandeur of religion and the necessity for 
its exercises; and you will find its philosophy, in so far as it 
is human, much loftier than that of the most daring minds.” 

The cur£, who displayed an almost childlike joy, then agreed 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 85 

to instruct the old man by meeting him as a catechumen twice 
a week. 

Thus the conversion ascribed to Ursule and to a spirit of 
sordid self-interest had been spontaneous. The priest, who 
for fourteen years had restrained himself from touching the 
wounds in that heart, though he had deeply deplored them, 
had been appealed to, as we go to a surgeon when we feel an 
injury. Since that scene every evening Ursule’s prayers had 
become family prayers. Every moment the old man had felt 
peace growing upon him in the place of agitation. And 
viewing God as the responsible editor of inexplicable facts — 
as he put it — his mind was quite easy. His darling child told 
him that by this it could be seen that he was making progress 
in the kingdom of God. 

To-day, during the service, he had just read the prayers 
with the exercise of his understanding; for, in his first talk 
with the cure, he had risen to the divine idea of the com- 
munion of the faithful. The venerable neophyte had under- 
stood the eternal symbol connected with that nourishment, 
which faith makes necessary as soon as the whole, deep, glori- 
ous meaning of the symbol is thoroughly felt. If he had 
seemed in a hurry to get home, it was to thank his dear little 
goddaughter for having brought him to the Lord, to use the 
fine old-fashioned phrase. And so he had her on his knee in 
his drawing-room, and was kissing her solemnly on the brow, 
at the very moment when his heirs, defiling her holy influence 
by their ignoble alarms, were lavishing on Ursule their coarsest 
abuse. The good man’s haste to be at home, his scorn, as 
they thought it, for his relations, his sharp replies as he left the 
church, were all naturally attributed by each of the family 
to the hatred for them which Ursule had implanted in him. 

While the girl was playing to her godfather the variations 
on La dcrni^re Pensec musicalc of Weber, a plot was being 
hatched in Minoret-Levrault’s dining-room, which was des- 


8G 


URSULE MIROUET. 

tined to bring on to the stage one of the most important actors 
in this drama. The breakfast, which lasted two hours, was as 
noisy as a provincial breakfast always is, and washed down by 
capital wine brought to Nemours by canal, either from Bur- 
gundy or from Touraine. Zelie had procured some shell-fish 
too, some sea-fish, and a few rarer dainties to do honor to 
Desire’s return. 

The dining-room, in its midst the round table of tempting 
aspect, looked like an inn-room. Zelie, satisfied with the 
extent of her household offices, had built a large room between 
the vast courtyard and the kitchen-garden, which was full of 
vegetables and fruit-trees. Here everything was merely neat 
and substantial. The example set by Levrault-Levrault had 
been a terror to the countryside, and Zelie had forbidden the 
master-builder’s dragging her into any such folly. The room 
was hung with satin paper, and furnished with plain walnut- 
wood chairs and sideboards, with an earthenware stove, a 
clock on the wall, and a barometer. Though the crockery 
was ordinary — plain white china — the table shone with linen 
and abundant plate. 

As soon as the coffee had been served by Zelie, who hopped 
to and fro like a grain of shot in a bottle of champagne, for 
she kept but one cook ; and when Desir6, the budding lawyer, 
had been fully apprised of the great event of the morning and 
its results, Zelie shut the door, and the notary Dionis was 
called upon to speak. The silence that fell, the looks fixed 
by each expectant heir on that authoritative face, plainly 
showed how great is the influence exercised by these men over 
whole families. 

“ My dear children,” he began, “ your uncle, having been 
born in 1746, is at this day eighty-three years old ; now old 
men are liable to fits of folly, and this little ” 

“ Viper ! ” exclaimed Madame Massin. 

“ Wretch ! ” said Zelie. 

“We will only call her by her name,” said Dionis. 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


87 


“Well, then, a thief,” said Madame Cremiere. 

“A very pretty thief,” added Desire Minoret. 

“This little Ursule,” Dionis went on, “is very dear to 
him. I have not waited till this morning to make inquiries 
in the interest of you all as my clients, and this is what I have 
learned concerning this young ” 

“ Spoiler ! ” put in the tax-collector. 

“ Underhand fortune-hunter,” said the lawyer’s clerk. 

“ Hush, my friends, or I shall put on my hat and go, and 
good-day to you.” 

“ Come, come, old man ! ” said Minoret, pouring him out 
a liqueur glassful of rum. “ Drink that ; it comes from Rome, 
direct.” 

“Ursule is no doubt Joseph Mirouet’s legitimate offspring. 
But her father was the natural son of Valentin Mirouet, your 
uncle’s father-in-law. Thus Ursule is the natural niece of 
Doctor Denis Minoret. As his natural niece, any will the 
doctor may make in her favor may perhaps be void, and if he 
should leave her his fortune, you may bring a lawsuit against 
her ; this might be bad enough for you, for it is impossible to 
say that there is no tie of relationship between the doctor and 
Ursule ; still, a lawsuit would certainly frighten a defenseless 
girl, and would result in a compromise.” 

“ The law is so rigorous as to the rights of natural children,” 
said the newly-hatched lawyer, eager to display his learning, 
“ that by the terms of a judgment of the Court of Appeals of 
July 7, 1817, a natural child can claim nothing from its natural 
grandfather, not even maintenance. So, you see, that the 
parentage of a natural child carries back. The law is against 
a natural child, even in his legitimate descendants; for it 
regards any legacies benefiting the grandchildren as bestowed 
through the personal intermediary of the natural son, their 
parent. This is the inference from a comparison of Articles 
757, 908, and 91 1 of the Civil Code. And, in fact, the Royal 
Court of Paris, on the 26th of December, only last year, 


88 


URSULE MIROUET. 


reduced a legacy bequeathed to the legitimate child of a 
natural son by its grandfather, who, as its grandfather, was as 
much a stranger in blood to his natural grandson as the doctor 
is to Ursule as her uncle.” 

“ All that,” said Goupil, “seems to me to relate only to 
the question of bequests made by grandparents to their 
illegitimate descendants ; it has nothing to do with uncles, 
who do not appear to me to have any blood relationships to 
the legitimate offspring of these natural half-brothers. Ursule 
is a stranger in blood to Doctor Minoret. I remember a 
judgment delivered in the Supreme Court at Colmar in 1825, 
when I was finishing my studies, by which it was pronounced 
that the illegitimate child being dead, his descendants could 
no longer be liable to his interposition. Now Ursule’s father 
is dead.” 

Goupil’s argument produced, what in reports of law cases 
journalists are accustomed to designate by this parenthesis : 
( Great sensation). 

“What does that matter?” cried Dionis. “Even if the 
case of a legacy left by the uncle of an illegitimate child has 
never yet come before the courts, if it should occur, the rigor 
of the French law towards natural children will be all the 
more surely applied, because we live in times when religion is 
respected. And I will answer for it that, in such a suit, a 
compromise would be offered ; especially if it were known 
that you were resolved to carry the case against Ursule even 
to the court of last resort.” 

The delight of heirs who might find piles of gold betrayed 
itself in smiles, little jumps, and gestures all round the table. 
No one observed Goupil’s shake of dissent. But, then, this 
exultation was immediately followed by deep silence and dis- 
may at the notary’s next word — 

“But ” 

Dionis at once saw every eye fixed on him, every face 
assuming the same angle, just as if he had pulled the wire of 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


89 


one of those toy theatres where all the figures move in jerks 
by the action of wheel-work. 

“ But there is no law to hinder your uncle from adopting 
or marrying Ursule," he went on. “As to an adoption, it 
might be disputed, and you would, I believe, win the case; 
the high courts are not to be trifled with in the matter of 
adoption, and you would be examined in the preliminary 
inquiry. It is all very well for the doctor to display the rib- 
bon of St. Michael, to be an officer of the Legion of Honor, 
and formerly physician to the ex-Emperor ; he would go to 
the wall. But though you might be warned in case of an 
adoption, how are you to know if he marries her ? The old 
fellow is quite sharp enough to get married in Paris after 
residing there for a year, and to secure to his bride a settle- 
ment of a million francs under the marriage contract. The 
only thing, therefore, which really jeopardizes your inherit- 
ance is that your uncle should marry the child." Here the 
notary paused. 

“ There is another risk,” said Goupil, with a knowing air. 
“ He may make a will in favor of a third person, old Bon- 
grand for instance, who would be constituted trustee for 
Mademoiselle Ursule Mirouet." 

“If you worry your uncle," Dionis began again, cutting 
short his head clerk, “ if you are not all as nice as possible to 
Ursule, you will drive him either into a marriage or into the 
trusteeship of which Goupil speaks ; but I do not think he is 
likely to have recourse to a trust ; it is a dangerous alterna- 
tive. As to his marrying her, it is easy to prevent it. 
Desire has only to show the girl a little attention ; she will 
certainly prefer a charming young fellow, the cock of the 
walk at Nemours, to an old man." 

“ Mother," said the postmaster’s son in Zelie’s ear, tempted 
both by the money and by Ursule’s beauty, “ if I were to 
marry her, we should get it all." 

“Are you mad? You who will have fifty thousand francs 


90 


URSULE MIROUET. 


a year one of these days and who are sure to be elected 
deputy ! So long as I live you shall never hang a millstone 
round your neck by a foolish marriage. Seven hundred thou- 
sand francs? Thank you for nothing! Why, monsieur, the 
mayor’s only daughter will have fifty thousand a year, and 
they have already made overtures.” 

This reply, in which, for the first time in his life, his mother 
spoke roughly to him, extinguished in Desire every hope of 
marrying the fair Ursule, for his father and he could never 
gain the day against the determination written in Zelie’s 
terrible blue eyes. 

“Yes; but, I say, Monsieur Dionis,” cried Cremiere, 
whose wife had nudged his elbow, “if the old man took the 
matter seriously, and let his ward marry Desire, settling on 
her the absolute possession of his property, good-by to our 
chances ! And if he lives another five years, our uncle will 
have at least a million.” 

“ Never,” cried Zelie ; “ never so long as I live and breathe 
shall Desire marry the daughter of a bastard, a girl taken in 
out of charity, picked up in the streets ! What next, by 
heaven ? At his uncle’s death my son will be the representa- 
tive of the Minorets ; and the Minorets can show five centuries 
of good citizenship. It is as good as a noble pedigree. 
Make your minds easy. Desire shall marry when we see what 
he is likely to do in the Chamber of Deputies.” 

This arrogant pronouncement was seconded by Goupil, who 
added — 

“ With eighty thousand francs a year, Desire may rise to be 
president of a supreme court, or public prosecutor, which 
leads to a peerage. A foolish marriage would be the ruin of 
his prospects.” 

The heirs all began to talk at once, but they were silenced 
by the blow of his fist that Minoret struck on the table to 
enable the notary to speak on. 

“ Your uncle is an excellent and worthy man,” said Dionis, 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


91 


“ He believes himself immortal ; and, like all clever men, he 
will allow death to overtake him before he has made his will. 
My opinion, therefore, for the moment, is that he should be 
induced to invest his capital in such a way as to make it diffi- 
cult to dispossess you; and the opportunity now offers. 
Young Portenduere is in Sainte Pelagie, locked up for a hun- 
dred and odd thousand francs of debts. His old mother 
knows he is in prison ; she is weeping like a Magdalen, and 
has asked the Abbe Chaperon to dinner, to talk over the 
catastrophe, no doubt. Well, I shall go this evening and 
suggest to your uncle to sell his stock of consolidated five per 
cents., which are at a hundred and eighteen, and lend the 
sum necessary to release the prodigal to Madame du Porten- 
duere on the farm at Bordieres and her dwelling-house. I am 
within my rights as a notary in applying to him on behalf of 
that little idiot of a Porte-nduere, and it is quite natural that 
I should wish him to change his investments; I get the com- 
mission, the stamps, and the business. If I can get him to 
take my advice, I shall propose to him to invest the rest of 
his capital in real estate. I have some splendid lands for sale 
in my office. When once his fortune is invested in real estate 
or in mortgages on land in this neighborhood, it will not 
easily fly away. It is always easy to raise difficulties in the 
way of realizing the capital if he should wish to do so.” 

The heirs, struck by the soundness of this logic, much 
more skillful than that of M. Josse, expressed themselves by 
approving murmurs. 

“ So settle it among yourselves,” added the notary, in con- 
clusion, “ to keep your uncle in this town, where he has his 
own ways, and where you can keep an eye on him. If you 
can find a lover for the girl, you will hinder her marrying.” 

<l But if she were to marry him?” said Goupil, urged by 
an ambitious instinct. 

M That would not be so bad after all; your loss would be 
set down in plain figures, and you would know what the old 

Q 


92 


VRSULE MIROUET. 


man would give her,” answered the notary. “Still, if you 
set Desire at her, he might easily play fast and loose with her 
till the old man’s death. Marriages are arranged and upset 
again.” 

“The shortest way,” said Goupil, “ if the doctor is likely 
to live a long time yet, would be to get her married to some 
good fellow, who would take her out of the way by settling 
with her at Sens, or Montargis, or Orleans, with a hundred 
thousand francs down.” 

Dionis, Massin, Zelie, and Goupil, the only clear heads of 
the party, exchanged glances full of meaning. 

“ He would be a maggot in the pear,” said Zelie in Massin’s 
ear. 

“ Why was he allowed to come ? ” replied the registrar. 

“ That would just suit you ! ” exclaimed Desire to Goupil ; 
“ but how could you ever keep yourself decent enough to 
please the old man and his ward ? ” 

“ You don’t think small beer of yourself! ” said Minoret, 
understanding Goupil at last. 

This coarse jest was greeted with shouts of laughter. But 
the lawyer’s clerk glared at the laughers with such a sweeping 
and terrible gaze that silence was immediately restored. 

“In these days,” Zelie whispered to Massin, “notaries 
think only of their own interests. What if Dionis, to get his 
commission, should take Ursule’s side?” 

“I know he is safe,” replied the registrar, with a keen 
twinkle in his wicked little eyes ; he was about to add, “ I 
have him in my power,” but he abstained, deeming it the 
more prudent course. 

“ I am entirely of Dionis’ opinion,” he said aloud. 

“And so am I,” exclaimed Zelie, though she already sus- 
pected the notary and Massin to be in collusion for their own 
advantage. 

“ My wife has given our vote,” said the postmaster, sipping 
a glass of spirits, though his face was already purple with 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


93 


digesting the meal and from a considerable consumption of 
wines and liqueurs. 

“It is quite right,” said the tax-collector. 

“Then will I call on him after dinner?” asked Dionis, 
good-naturedly. 

“If Monsieur Dionis is right,” said Madame Cremiere to 
Madame Massin, “ we ought to go to see your uncle, as we used 
to, every Sunday evening, and do all Monsieur Dionis has 
just told us.” 

“Yes, indeed! To be received as we have been,” ex- 
claimed Zelie. “ After all, we have an income of over forty 
thousand francs ; and he has refused all our invitations. We 
are as good as he is. I can steer my own ship, thank you, 
though I cannot write prescriptions ! ” 

“ As I am far from having forty thousand francs a year,” 
said Madame Massin, nettled, “I am not anxious to lose ten 
thousand ! ” 

“ We are his nieces ; we will look after him ; we shall see 
what is going on,” said Madame Cremiere. “ And some day, 
Cousin Zelie, you will be beholden to us.” 

“ Be civil to Ursule ; old Jordy left her his savings,” said 
the notary, putting his right forefinger to his lip. 

“ I will mind my P’s and Q’s,” said Desire. 

“You were a match for Desroches, the sharpest attorney in 
Paris,” said Goupil to his master, as they quitted the house. 

“ And they dispute our bills,” remarked the notary, with a 
bitter smile. 

The heirs, seeing out Dionis and his head clerk, found 
themselves at the gate, all with faces heated from the meal, 
just as the congregation came out from vespers. As the 
notary had foretold, the Abbe Chaperon had given his arm 
to old Madame de Portenduere. 

“ She has dragged him to vespers ! ” cried Madame Massin, 
pointing out to Madame Cremiere Ursule coming out of the 
church with her uncle. 


94 


URSULE MIROUET. 


“Let us go and speak to him,” suggested Madame Cre- 
miere, going forward. 

The change which the conclave had produced in all their 
countenances astonished Doctor Minoret. He wondered what 
the cause could be of this friendliness to order, and out of 
curiosity he favored a meeting between Ursule and these two 
women, who were eager to address her with exaggerated sweet- 
ness and forced smiles. 

“Uncle, will you allow us to call on you this evening?” 
said Madame Cremiere. “ We sometimes think we are in the 
way ; but it is long now since our children have paid their 
respects to you, and our daughters are of an age to make 
friends with dear Ursule.” 

“ Ursule justifies her name,” said the doctor; “she is not 
at all tame.” 

“ Let us tame her,” said Madame Massin. “ And besides, 
my dear uncle,” added the prudent housewife, trying to con- 
ceal her scheming under a semblance of economy, “we have 
been told that your charming goddaughter has such a talent 
for the piano, that we should be enchanted to hear her play. 
Madame Cremiere and I are rather inclined to have her master 
to teach our girls ; for if he had seven or eight pupils he might 
fix a price for his lessons within our means ” 

“ By all means,” said the old man ; “all the more, indeed, 
because I am thinking of getting a singing-master for Ursule.” 

“Very well; then this evening, uncle; and we will bring 
your grand-nephew Desire, who is now a full-fledged attor- 
ney.” 

“ Till this evening,” replied Minoret, who wished to study 
these mean souls. 

His two nieces shook hands with Ursule, saying with affected 
graciousness, “Till this evening.” 

“ Oh, dear godfather, you can read my heart, I believe ! ” 
cried Ursule, with a grateful look at the old man. 

“ You have a good voice,” he said. “ And I also mean to 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


95 


give you drawing and Italian lessons. A woman,” he added, 
looking at Ursule as he opened the gate of his own courtyard, 
il ought to be educated in such a way as to be equal to any 
position in which she may be placed by marriage.” 

Ursule blushed as red as a cherry; her guardian seemed to 
be thinking of the very person she herself was thinking of. 
Feeling herself on the point of confessing to the doctor the 
involuntary impulse which made her think of Savinien, and 
refer all her strivings after perfection to him, she went to sit 
under the bower of creepers, against which she looked from a 
distance like a white and blue flower. 

“Now you see, godfather, your nieces were kind to me; 
they were very nice just now,” said she, as he followed her, 
to mislead him as to the thoughts which had made her pensive. 

“ Poor little thing ! ” said the old man. He laid Ursule’s 
hand on his arm, patting it gently, and led her along the 
terrace by the river, where no one could overhear them. 

“Why do you say, ‘ Poor little thing?’ ” 

“ Can you not see that they are afraid of you? ” 

“But why?” 

“ My heirs are at this moment very uneasy about my con- 
version ; they ascribe it, no doubt, to your influence, and 
fancy that I shall deprive them of their inheritance to make 
you the richer.” 

“But you will not?” said Ursule with simplicity, and 
looking in his face. 

“Ah, divine comfort of my old age,” said the old man, 
lifting her up, and kissing her on both cheeks. “It was for 
her sake and not for my own, O God, that I besought Thee 
just now to suffer me to live till I shall have given her into 
the keeping of some good man worthy of her ! You will see, 
my angel, the farce that the Minorets and the Cremieres and 
the Massins are going to play here. You want to prolong 
and beautify my life. They ! they think of nothing but my 
death ! ” 


9G 


URSULE MIROUET. 


“ God forbids us to hate ; but if that is true — oh, I scorn 
them ! ” cried Ursule. 

“ Dinner ! ” cried La Bougival, from the top of the steps 
which, on the garden side, were at the end of the gallery. 

Ursule and the doctor were eating their dessert in the 
pretty dining-room, painted to imitate Chinese lacquer, which 
had ruined Levrault-Levrault, when the justice walked in. 
The doctor, as his most signal mark of intimacy, offered him 
a cup of his own coffee, a mixture of Mocha with Bourbon 
and Martinique berries, roasted, ground, and made by his 
own hands in a silver coffee-pot of the kind patented by 
Chaptal. 

“ Well, well,” said Bongrand, putting up his spectacles, 
and looking at the old man with a sly twinkle, “ the town is 
by the ears ! Your appearance at church has revolutionized 
your relations. You are going to leave everything to the 
priests and to the poor ! You have stirred them up, and they 
are astir ! Oh ! I saw their first commotion on the church 
square ; they were as fussy as a nest of ants robbed of their 
eggs.” 

“What did I tell you, Ursule? ” exclaimed the old man. 
“Even at the risk of grieving you, my child, am I not bound 
to teach you to know the world, and to put you on your guard 
against undeserved enmity.” 

“I wanted to say a few words to you on that subject,” said 
Bongrand, seizing the opportunity of speaking to his old 
friend about Ursule’s future prospects. 

The doctor put a black velvet cap on his white head, and 
the justice kept on his hat as a protection against the dew, 
and they walked together up and down the terrace, talking 
over the means of securing to Ursule the little fortune the 
doctor proposed to leave her. Bongrand knew the opinion 
of Dionis as to the invalidity of any will made by the doctor 
in Ursule’s favor, for Nemours was too inquisitive as to the 
Minoret inheritance for this question not to have been dis- 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


97 


cussed by the wise heads of the town. He himself had 
decided that Ursule was an alien in blood as regarded Doctor 
Minoret ; but he was fully aware that the spirit of the law 
was adverse to the recognition of illegitimate offspring as mem- 
bers of the family. The framers of the Code had only antici- 
pated the weakness of fathers and mothers for their natural 
children ; it had not been supposed that uncles or aunts 
might have such tender feelings for an illegitimate relation as 
to favor his descendants. There was evidently an omission 
in the law. 

“In any other country,” said he to the doctor, after set- 
ting forth the state of the law which Goupil, Dionis, and 
Desire had just explained to the heirs, “ Ursule would have 
nothing to fear. She is a legitimate child, and her father’s 
disabilities ought only to affect the money left by Valentin 
Mirouet, your father-in-law. But in France the bench is 
unluckily very clever and very logical ; it insists on the spirit 
of the law. Pleaders will talk of morality, and prove that 
the omission in the Code arises from the single-mindedness 
of the framers, who never foresaw such a case, but who never- 
theless established a principle. A lawsuit would be lengthy 
and costly. With Zelie on the other side it would be carried 
to the court of appeal ; and I cannot be sure that I should 
be still living when the case was tried.” 

“The strongest case is not certain to stand,” cried the 
doctor. “lean see the documents on the subject already : 
‘To what degree of relationship ought the disabilities of 
natural children in the matter of inheritance to extend?’ and 
the glory of a clever lawyer is to gain a rotten suit.” 

“On my honor,” said Bongrand, “I would not take it 
upon myself to assert that the judges would not widen the 
interpretation of the law so as to extend its protection of 
marriage, which is the everlasting foundation of society.” 

Without explaining his intentions, the doctor rejected the 
idea of a trust. But as to the notion of marrying her, which 
7 


98 


URSULE MIROUET. 

Bongrand suggested as a means of securing her his for* 
tune — 

“ Poor little thing! ” cried the doctor. “I may live fif- 
teen years yet. What would become of her ? ’ ’ 

“ Well, then, what do you propose? ” said Bongrand. 

“ We must think about it. I shall see,” replied the old 
doctor, evidently at a loss for an answer. 

At this instant Ursule came to tell the friends that Dionis 
wished to see the doctor. 

“ Dionis already ! ” exclaimed Minoret, looking at the jus- 
tice. “Yes,” he said to Ursule; “let him be shown in.” 

“I will bet my spectacles to a brimstone match that he is 
your heirs’ stalking-horse. They breakfasted together at the 
posting-house, and something has been plotted there.” 

The notary, following Ursule, came out into the garden. 
After the usual civilities and a few commonplace remarks, 
Dionis begged for a moment’s private conversation. Ursule 
and Bongrand went into the drawing-room. 

“We must think about it ! I shall see! ” said Bongrand 
to himself, echoing the doctor’s last words. “ That is what 
clever people think ; then death overtakes them, and they leave 
those who are dearest to them in the greatest difficulties.” 

The distrust a man of business feels of a man of talent is 
extraordinary. He cannot admit that the greater includes the 
less. But this very distrust, perhaps, implies praise. Seeing 
these superior minds inhabiting the high peaks of human 
thought, men of business do not believe them capable of de- 
scending to the infinitely small details which, like interest in 
the world of finance, or microscopic creatures in natural his- 
tory, at last accumulate till they equal the capital, or consti- 
tute a world. It is a mistake. The man of feeling and the 
man of genius see everything. 

Bongrand, nettled by the doctor’s persistent silence, but 
urged, no doubt, by Ursule’s interests, which he feared were 
compromised, determined to protect her against her rivals. 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


99 


He was in despair at not knowing what was going on between 
the old man and Dionis. 

“ However pure-minded Ursule may be,” thought he, as he 
looked at her, “ there is one point on which young girls are 
wont to have their own ideas of jurisprudence and morality. 
Let us try ! ” “ The Minoret-Levraults,” said he to Ursule, as 
he settled his spectacles, “are quite capable of proposing that 
you should marry their son.” 

The poor child turned pale. She had been too well brought 
up, and had too much perfect delicacy, to go and listen to 
what her uncle and Dionis were saying ; but after a short 
deliberation she thought she might go into the room, thinking 
that if she were in the way her godfather would make her 
understand it. The Chinese summer-house, which was the 
doctor’s private study, had the shutters of the glass door left 
open. Ursule’s idea was that she would go herself to close 
them. She apologized for leaving the lawyer alone in the 
drawing-room ; but he smiled and said — 

“ Do so, do so.” 

Ursule went to the steps leading from the Chinese summer- 
house down to the garden, and there she stood for some min- 
utes slowly closing the Venetian shutters and looking at the 
sunset. Then she heard this answer spoken by the doctor as 
he came towards the summer-house — 

“My heirs would be delighted to see me possessed of real 
estate and mortgages. They fancy that my fortune would be 
much more safely invested. I can guess all they could say ; 
and you, perhaps, are their representative. But, my dear sir, 
my arrangements are unalterable. My heirs will have the 
capital of the fortune I brought here with me; they may 
accept that as a certainty, and leave me in peace. If either 
of them should make any change in what I believe it to be 
my duty to do for that child” (and he pointed to his god- 
daughter), “ I will come back from the other world to torment 
him ! So Monsieur Savinien de Portenduere may remain in 


100 


URSULE MIROUET. 

prison if his release depends on me,” added the doctor. “ I 
shall not sell any of my securities.” 

As she heard the last words of this speech, Ursule felt the 
first, the only grief she had ever known. She rested her 
forehead against the shutter, and clung to it for support. 

“Good heavens! what ails her?” cried the old doctor; 
“ she is colorless. Such emotion just after dinner might kill 
her ! ” 

He put out his arm to hold Ursule, who fell almost faint- 
ing. 

“Good-evening, monsieur; leave me,” he said to the 
notary. 

He carried his goddaughter to a huge easy-chair, dating 
from Louis XV., which stood in his study, seized a phial of 
ether from his medicine store, and made her inhale it. 

“ Go and take my place, my friend,” said he to Bongrand, 
who was alarmed ; “I must stay with her.” 

The justice walked to the gate with the notary, asking him, 
but without any show of eagerness, “ What has come over 
Ursule ? ” 

“I do not know,” said Monsieur Dionis. “She was 
standing on the steps listening to us ; and when her uncle re- 
fused to lend the necessary sum to release young Portenduere, 
who is in prison for debt — for he had not a Monsieur Bon- 
grand to defend him as Monsieur du Rouvre had — she turned 
pale and tottered. Does she love him ? Can there be ? ” 

“At fifteen! ” said Bongrand, interrupting Dionis. 

“ She was born in February, 1814. In four months she will 
be sixteen.” 

“ But she has never seen her neighbor,” replied the justice. 
“ No, it is just an attack.” 

“ An attack of the heart,” said the notary. 

Dionis was much delighted by his discovery ; it would 
avert the dreaded marriage by which the doctor might have 
frustrated the hopes of his heirs, while Bongrand saw his 




WHAT AILS YOU, CRUEL CHILD?” HE SAID, 








































THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


101 


castles in the air in ruins ; he had long dreamed of a marriage 
between his own son and Ursule. 

“ If the poor child should be in love with that youth, it 
would be unfortunate for her. Madame de Portenduere is a 
Bretonne, and crazy about noble birth,” replied the justice, 
after a pause. 

“ Happily — for the honor of fhe Portendueres,” said the 
notary, who had nearly betrayed himself. 

To do the worthy and honorable lawyer full justice, it must 
be said that, on his way from the gate to the drawing-room, 
he gave up, not without regret for his son’s loss, the hope he 
had cherished of one day calling Ursule his daughter. He 
intended to give his son six thousand francs a year as soon as 
he was appointed deputy recorder ; and if the doctor would 
have settled a hundred thousand francs on Ursule, the young 
couple should have been patterns of a happy household. His 
Eugene was a loyal and accomplished young fellow. Perhaps 
he had a little over-praised Eugene, and perhaps old Min- 
oret’s suspicions had been aroused by that. 

“ I will fall back on the mayor’s daughter,” thought Bon- 
grand. “ But Ursule without a penny would be better than 
Mademoiselle Levrault-Cremiere with her million. Now we 
must see what can be done to get Ursule married to this 
young Portenduere, if, in fact, she loves him.” 

After closing the doors on the side next the library and the 
garden, the doctor led the girl to the window that looked 
over the river. 

“ What ails you, cruel child ? ” he said. “ Your life is my 
life. Without your smile what would become of me ? ” 

“ Savinien — in prison!” answered she, and with these 
words a torrent of tears burst from her eyes, and she began to 
sob. 

“Now all will be well,” said the old man to himself, as he 
stood feeling her pulse with a father’s anxiety. “ Alas ! she 
has all my poor wife’s nervous sensibility ! ” he thought ; and 


102 


URSULE MIROUET. 


he brought a stethoscope, which he placed over Ursule s heart 
and listened. “ Well, there is nothing wrong there, he said 
to himself. “ I did not know, my sweetheart, that you loved 
him so much already,” he went on, as he looked at her. 
“ But think to me as if to yourself, and tell me all that has 
occurred between you.” 

“ I do not love him, godfather ; we have never spoken to 
each other,” she sobbed out ; “ but to know that the poor 
young man is in prison, and to hear that you, who are so 
kind, refuse sternly to help him out ” 

“ Ursule, my sweet little angel, if you do not love him, 
why have you put a red dot to the day of Saint Savinien as 
you have to that of Saint Denis ? Come, tell me all the 
smallest incidents of this love affair.” 

Ursule colored, and swallowed down a few tears; for a 
minute there was silence between them. 

“ Are you afraid of your father, of your friend, your mother, 
your physician, your godfather, whose heart has within these 
few days become even more soft and loving than it was? ” 

“Well, then, dear godfather,” said she, “ I will open my 
soul to you. In the month of May, Monsieur Savinien came 
to see his mother. Till that visit I had never paid the least 
attention to him. When he went away to live in Paris I was 
a little child, and I saw no difference, I swear to you, between 
a young man — and others like you, excepting that I loved 
you, and never imagined I could love any one better, whoever 
he might be. Monsieur Savinien arrived by the mail-coach 
the night before his mother’s birthday without our knowing 
of it. At seven next morning, after saying my prayers, as I 
opened the window to air my room, I saw the open windows 
of Monsieur Savinien’s room, and Monsieur Savinien himself 
in his dressing-gown engaged in shaving himself, and doing 
everything with such grace in his movements — in short, I 
thought him very nice. He combed his black mustache, 
and the little tuft on his chin, and I saw his throat white and 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


103 


round. Oh ! must I say it all ? I noticed that his fresh neck, 
and his face, and his beautiful black hair were quite unlike 
yours when I see you shaving yourself ; and something rose 
up in me from I know not where — like a mist rushing in 
waves to my heart, to my throat, to my head, and so violently 
that I had to sit down. I could not stand ; I was trembling. 
But I longed so much to see him that I pulled myself up 
on tiptoe ; then he saw me, and for fun he blew me a kiss 

from the ends of his fingers, and " 

“ And ” 

“ And I hid myself," she went on, “ equally ashamed and 
happy, without understanding why I was ashamed of my 
happiness. This feeling, which bewildered my soul while 
giving it an unexplained sense of power, came over me each 
time that I saw his young face again in fancy. Indeed, I 
liked to have that feeling, though it was so painfully agitating. 
As I went to mass an irresistible force made me look at Mon- 
sieur Savinien giving his arm to his mother, and his way of 
walking, and his clothes — everything about him, to the sound 
of his boots on the pavement, seemed so pretty. The least 
thing about him, his hand in its fine kid glove, had a sort of 
charm for me. And yet I was strong enough not to think of 
him during the service. As we came out I waited in the 
church to let Madame de Portenduere go first, so as to walk 
behind him. I cannot tell you how much I was interested in 
all these little things. On coming in, as I turned round to 
shut the gate " 

“ And La Bougival?" asked the'doctor. 

“Oh, I had let her go to the kitchen," said Ursule inno- 
cently. “ So I could, of course, see Monsieur Savinien stand- 
ing squarely to look at me. Oh, dear godfather, I felt so 
proud as I fancied I saw in his eyes a sort of surprise and 
admiration, and I do not know what I would not have done 
to give him cause to look at me. I felt as though henceforth 
I ought to think of nothing but of how to please him. His 


104 


URSULE MIKOUET. 

look is now the sweetest reward of all I can do right. From 
that moment I have thought of him incessantly and in spite 
of myself. Monsieur Savinien went away that evening, and 
I have not seen him since ; the Rue des Bourgeois has seemed 
quite empty, and he has taken my heart away with him, as it 
were, without knowing it.” 

“ And that is all ? ” asked the doctor. 

“Yes, all, godfather,” she said with a sigh, in which 
regret at having no more to tell was lost in the grief of the 
moment. 

“My dear child,” said the old man, drawing Ursule on to 
his knee, “you will soon be sixteen years old, and your life 
as a woman will begin. You are now between your blissful 
childhood, which is coming to an end, and the agitations of 
love, which will make life stormy for you, for you have the 
highly strung nerves of an excessively sensitive nature. It is 
love, my child, that has come upon you,” said the old man, 
with a look of deep pathos, “ love in its holy simplicity, love 
as it ought to be, involuntary and swift, coming like a thief 
that takes all — yes, all ! And I was prepared for it. I have 
studied women carefully, and I know that, though with most 
of them love does not wholly possess them till after many 
proofs, many miracles of affection, if such as these do not 
speak nor yield till they are conquered, there are others who, 
under the sway of a sympathy which can now be accounted 
for by magnetic fluids, are vanquished in a moment. I can 
tell you now : as soon as I saw the lovely woman who bore 
your name, I felt that I -should love her alone and faithfully 
without knowing whether in our characters or our persons we 
should prove suitable. Is there a second-sight in love ? How 
can the question be answered, when we see so many unions, 
which have been 'sanctioned by such a sacred contract, de- 
stroyed afterwards, and giving rise to almost eternal hatred 
and intense aversion ? The senses may be in affinity while 
minds are discordant, and some persons perhaps live more by 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


105 


the mind than by the senses. On the other hand, characters 
are often suited in persons who cannot please each other. 

“These two opposite phenomena, which would account for 
many catastrophes, demonstrate the wisdom of the law which 
leaves to parents supreme control over the marriage of their 
children ; for a young girl is often the dupe of one of these two 
hallucinations. And, indeed, I do not blame you. The feel- 
ings you experience, the emotional impulse which rushes from 
its hitherto unknown focus to your heart and to your brain, 
the joy with which you think of Savinien, are all quite natural. 
But, my adored child, as our good Abbe Chaperon will have 
told you, society demands the sacrifice of many natural im- 
pulses. The destiny of men is one thing, the destiny of 
women another. It was in my power to choose Ursule Mirouet 
for my wife, to go to her and tell her how much I loved her, 
whereas a young girl is false to her virtue when she solicits the 
love of the man she loves ; a woman is not, as we are, at 
liberty to follow up in broad daylight the fulfillment of her 
hopes. Thus, modesty is in women, and especially in you, 
the insurmountable barrier which guards the secrets of your 
heart. Your hesitation to confide even to me what your first 
emotions had been shows me plainly that you would suffer 
the worst torments rather than confess to Savinien ” 

“ Oh, yes ! ” she exclaimed. 

“ But, my child, you must do more. You must repress these 
impulses of your heart, you must forget them.” 

“ Whv?” 

j 

“Because, my little darling, you must love no man but 
him who will be your husband ; and even if Monsieur Savinien 
de Portenduere should love you ” 

“ I had not thought of such a thing.” 

“Listen to me. Even if he should love you, even if his 
mother were to ask me to give him your hand, I would not 
consent to the marriage till I had subjected Savinien to a long 
and mature course of proof. His recent conduct has placed 


106 


URSULE MIROUET. 


him under a cloud in every good family, and raised such 
barriers between him and any young girl of fortune as it will 
be hard to break down.” 

A heavenly smile checked Ursule’s tears, as she said, 
“ Misfortune has its good uses ! ” 

The doctor found nothing to say to her artlessness. 

“ What has he done, godfather? ” she inquired. 

“ In two years, my darling, he has run into debt in Paris to 
the sum of a hundred and twenty thousand francs ! He has 
been so clumsy as to let himself be taken and imprisoned at 
Sainte-Pelagie, a blunder which disgraces a young man for 
ever in these days. A spendthrift who can bring his mother 
to grief and penury would kill his wife with despair, as your 
poor father did.” 

“ Do you think he might amend his ways ? ” she asked. 

“If his mother pays his debts, he will be left without a 
penny, and I know no harder punishment for a nobleman than 
to be penniless.” 

This reply made Ursule thoughtful ; she wiped away her 
tears, and said to her godfather — 

“ If you can save him, do so, godfather. Such a service 
will give you the right to admonish him ; you will remon- 
strate with him ” « 

“And then,” said the doctor, mimicking her tone, “he 
may perhaps come here, and the old lady too, and we shall 
see them, and ” 

“At this moment I am thinking only of him,” replied 
Ursule, coloring. 

“Think of him no more, my poor child. It is madness,” 
said the doctor gravely. “ Never would Madame de Porten- 
duere — a Kergarouet— if she had but three hundred francs a 
year to live on, consent to see the Vicomte Savinien de 
Portenduere, grand-nephew of the late Comte de Portenduere, 
lieutenant-general of the King’s naval forces, and son of the 
Vicomte de Portenduere, ship’s captain, married to — whom? 


THE IIEIRS IN ALARM. 


107 


Ursule Mirouet, the daughter of a regimental bandmaster, 
without a fortune ; and whose father — now is the time to tell 
you — was the bastard son of an organist, my father-in-law.” 

“ Yes, godfather, you are right. We are equals only in 
the eyes of God. I will think of him no more — except in 
my prayers ! ” she exclaimed through the sobs with which she 
received this information. “ Give him all you intended to 
leave me. What can a poor girl like me want of money ! — 
and he, in prison ! ” 

“Lay all your distresses before God, and He perhaps will 
intervene to help us.” 

For some minutes silence reigned. When Ursule, who 
dared not look at her godfather, presently raised her eyes to 
his face, she was deeply moved by seeing tears flowing down 
his withered cheeks. The tears of an old man are as terrible 
as those of a child are natural. 

“What, oh, what is the matter with you?” she cried, 
falling at his feet and kissing his hands. “ Do you not 
trust me ? ” 

“ I, who only wish to satisfy your every wish, am compelled 
to cause the first great sorrow of your life ! I am as much 
grieved as you are ! I never shed a tear but when my children 
died and my Ursule. There, I will do anything you like ! ” 
he exclaimed. 

Ursule, through her tears, gave her godfather a look that 
was like a flash of light. She smiled. 

“ Now, come into the drawing-room and contrive to keep 
your own counsel about all this, my child,” said the doctor, 
and he went out, leaving her alone in the study. 

The fatherly soul was so weak before this smile that he was 
about to speak a word of hope which might have deluded his 
goddaughter. 

At this moment Madame de Portendudre, alone with the 
curd in her chilly little ground-floor drawing-room, had just 


108 


URSULE MIROUET. 


finished confiding her woes to the good priest, her only 
friend. She held in her hand some letters which the abbe 
had returned to her after reading them, and which had been 
the crown of her misery. Seated in an armchair, on one side 
of the square table covered with the remains of the dessert, 
the old lady looked at the cure, who, on the other, huddled 
into a deep chair, was stroking his chin with that strange 
gesture peculiar to the stage valet, to mathematicians, and 
priests, as betraying meditation on a problem difficult of 
solution. 

The little room, lighted by two windows looking on the 
street, and lined with wainscoting painted gray, was so damp 
that the lower panels displayed the geometrical crackle of de- 
caying wood when it is no longer held together by paint. 
The floor, of red tiles rubbed smooth by the lady’s only ser- 
vant, made little round hempen mats a necessity in front of 
each chair, and on one of these mats were the abbe’s feet. 
The curtains, of light-green flowered damask, were drawn, 
and the shutters closed. Two wax-candles lighted the table; 
the rest of the room was half-dark. Need it be said that 
between the windows a fine pastel by Latour showed the por- 
trait of the famous Admiral de Portenduere, the rival of Suf- 
fren, of Kergarouet, of Guichen, of Simeuse? On the wain- 
scot opposite the chimney might be seen the Vicomte de Por- 
tenduere and the old lady’s mother, a Kergarouet-Ploegat. 

Savinien, then, was great-nephew to Vice-Admiral Ker- 
garouet and cousin to the Comte de Portenduere, the admi- 
ral’s grandson, both of them very rich. The vice-admiral 
lived in Paris, and the Comte de Portenduere at his chateau 
of the same name in Dauphine. The Count, his cousin, rep- 
resented the elder branch, and Savinien was the only scion 
of the younger branch of the Portendueres. 

The Count, a man of past forty, married to a rich wife, had 
three children. His fortune, augmented several times by in- 
heritance, brought him in, it was said, sixty thousand francs a 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


109 


year. He represented the department of the Isere as deputy, 
spending the winter in Paris, where he had repurchased the 
mansion of the Portendueres with the indemnity paid him 
under Villele’s act. The vice-admiral had lately married his 
niece,* Mademoiselle de Fontaine, solely to settle his fortune 
on her. Thus the young Vicomte’s errors had perhaps de- 
prived him of the interest of two powerful friends. 

Savinien, young and handsome, if he had entered the navy, 
with his name and the interest of an admiral and of a deputy 
to back him, might perhaps at three-and-twenty have been 
already first-lieutenant ; but his mother, averse to seeing her 
only son engage in a military career, had had him educated 
at Nemours by one of the Abbe Chaperon’s curates, and had 
flattered herself that she might keep her son at her side till her 
death. She had hoped to marry him very prudently to a 
demoiselle d’Aiglemont, with twelve thousand francs a year; 
the name of Portenduere, and the farm-lands of Bordieres, 
justifying his pretensions to her hand. This moderate but 
judicious scheme, which might have re-established the family 
in another generation, had been frustrated by events. The 
d’Aiglemonts were now ruined, and one of their daughters, 
Helene, the eldest, had vanished without any explanation 
being offered by the family. 

The tedium of a life devoid of outdoor interests, of pur- 
pose, and of action, with nothing to support it but the love of 
a son for his mother, so wearied Savinien that he burst his 
bonds, light as they were, and vowed he would never live in 
a country town ; discovering, somewhat late, that his future 
did not lie in the Rue des Bourgeois. So at one-and-twenty 
he left his mother to introduce himself to his relations, and 
try his fortune in Paris. 

The contrast between life at Nemours and life in the capital 
could not fail to be fatal to a youth of one-and-twenty, per- 
fectly free, with no one to contradict him, of course greedy 


* See “ Le Bal de Sceaux.” 


110 


VRSULE MIROUET. 


for pleasure, and to whom the name of Portenduere and the 
wealth of his connections opened every drawing-room. Con- 
vinced that his mother had somewhere stored the savings of 
twenty years, Savinien had soon squandered the six thousand 
francs she had given him to spend in Paris. This sum did 
not defray the expenses of the first six months, and by that 
time he owed twice as much to his lodging-keeper, his tailor, 
his bootmaker, to a man from whom he hired carriages and 
horses, to a jeweler, in short, to all the tradespeople who 
supply the luxury of youth. He had hardly achieved making 
himself known, had hardly learned to speak, to enter a room, 
to wear and choose a waistcoat, to order his clothes and tie 
his cravat, when he found himself possessed of thirty thousand 
francs of debts, and had not yet gotten farther than trying to 
find an insinuating phrase in which to declare his passion to 
Madame de Serizy, the sister of the Marquis de Ronquerolles, 
an elegant woman still, whose youth had shone through the 
empire. 

“And how did you fellows get out of the scrape?” said 
Savinien one day after breakfast to some young men of fashion 
with whom he was intimate, as even at this day young men 
become intimate when their pretensions in all respects tend to 
the same ends, and when they proclaim an impossible equality. 
“You were no richer than I ; you live on without a care, you 
support yourselves, and I am already in debt.” 

“We all began in the same way,” they replied, with a 
laugh — Rastignac, Lucien de Rubempre, Maxime de Trailles, 
Emile Blondet, the dandies of that day. 

“If de Marsay was rich at beginning life, it was a mere 
chance ! ” said their host, a parvenu named Finot, who tried 
to rub elbows with these young men. “ And if he had been 
any one else,” he added, b©wing to Marsay, “his fortune 
might have been his ruin.” 

“You have hit the word,” said Maxime de Trailles. 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


Ill 


“And the idea too,” replied Rastignac. 

“My dear boy,” said de Marsay gravely to Savinien, 
“ debts are the sleeping partners of experience. A good 
college education, with masters for the ornamental and the 
useful, from which you learn nothing, co-sts sixty thousand 
francs. If the education the world gives you costs double, it 
teaches you life, business, and politics; to know men and 
sometimes women.” 

Blondet capped the lecture by a parody on a line of La 
Fontaine’s — 

“ The world sells us dear what we fancy k gives! ” 

But instead of reflecting on the good sense in what the 
most skilled pilots of the Paris shoals had said, Savinien took 
it all as a jest. 

“ Take care, my dear fellow,” said de Marsay, “ you have 
a fine name, and if you cannot acquire the fortune your name 
demands you may end your days as quartermaster to a cavalry 
regiment, 

“ ‘ For nobler heads than thine have had a fall,’ ” 

he added, quoting Corneille, and taking Savinien’s arm. “It 
is about six years,” he went on, “ since a certain young Comte 
d’Esgrignon came among us, who did not live more than two 
years in the paradise of fashion ! Alas, his career was as that 
of the sky-rocket. He rose as high as the Duchesse de Mau- 
frigneuse, and he fell into his native town, where he is now 
expiating his sins between a snuffling old father and rubbers 
of whist at two sous a point. Go, then, and frankly explain 
your position to Madame de S6rizy; do not be ashamed; 
she will be of great use to you ; whereas, if you play a charade 
of first love, she will pose as a Raphael Madonna, play inno- 
cent games, and send you a most expensive excursion round 
the ‘ Pays du Tendre ’ ” (Country of Sentiment). 

Savinien, still too young and too sensitive to a gentleman’s 


112 


UR SUL E MIROUET. 


honor, dared not confess the state of his fortunes to Madame de 
Serizy. Madame de Portenduere, at a moment when her son 
knew not which way to turn, sent him twenty thousand francs, 
all she had, in answer to a letter in which Savinien, taught by 
his companions the tactics of assault by sons on their parents’ 
strong-boxes, hinted at bills to meet, and the disgrace of dis- 
honoring his endorsements. With this help, he got on to 
the end of the first year. During the second year, as a cap- 
tive at the wheels of Madame de Serizy’s car — for she had 
taken a serious fancy to him, and was teaching him his paces 
— “he availed himself of the perilous aid of money-lenders. A 
deputy, named des Lupeaulx, who was his friend, and a friend 
of his cousin de Portenduere, introduced him one miserable 
day to Gobseck, to Gigonnct, and to Palma, who, being duly 
and fully informed as to the value of his mother’s property, 
made things easy for him. The money-lenders, by the delu- 
sive aid of renewals, gave him a happy life for about eighteen 
months more. Without daring to neglect Madame de Serizy, 
the hapless boy fell desperately in love with the young Com- 
tesse de Kergarouet, a prude, as all young women are who are 
waiting for the death of an old husband, and who are clever 
enough to save up their virtue for a second marriage. Savi- 
nien, unable to understand that virtue based on reasons is 
invincible, paid his court to Emilie de Kergarouet with all 
the display of a rich man ; he was never missing from a ball 
or a theatre if she was to be there. 

“ My boy, you have not enough powder to blow up that 
rock ! ” de Marsay said to him one evening, with a laugh. 

This young prince of Paris fashion vainly attempted, out of 
commiseration, to make the lad understand Emilie de Fon- 
taine’s character, only the gloomy light of disaster and the 
darkness of a prison could enlighten Savinien. A bill of 
exchange, rashly assigned to a jeweler in collusion with the 
money-lenders, who did not choose to take the odium of 
arresting him, led to Savinien de Portenduere being con- 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


113 


signed to Sainte-Pelagie, unknown to his friends. As soon 
as the news was known to Rastignac, de Marsay, and Lucien 
de Rubempre, they all three went to see Savinien, and, find- 
ing him absolutely destitute, each offered him a note for a 
thousand francs. His own servant, bribed by two creditors, 
led them to the apartment where Savinien lodged in secret, 
and everything had been seized but the clothes and a few 
trinkets he had on him. 

The three young men, fortified by a capital dinner, while 
they drank some sherry that de Marsay had brought with him, 
catechised Savinien as to the state of his affairs, ostensibly to 
make arrangements for the future, but in reality, no doubt, to 
pass sentence on him. 

“When your name is Savinien de Portenduere,” cried 
Rastignac, “ when you have a future peer of France for your 
cousin and the Admiral de Kergarouet for your grand-uncle, 
if you are such a blunderer as to let yourself be sent to Sainte- 
Pelagie, at any rate you must get out of it, my dear fellow ! ” 

“Why did you say nothing about it to me?” cried de 
Marsay. “ My traveling carriage was at your orders, ten 
thousand francs, and letters for Germany. We know Gob- 
seck and Gigonnet, and the other beasts of prey ; we would 
have brought them to terms. To begin with, what has brought 
you to drink of these poisoned waters?” asked de Marsay. 

“ Des Lupeaulx.” 

The three young men looked at each other, communicating 
the same thought, a suspicion, but without speaking it. 

“Explain your resources; show us your hand,” said de 
Marsay. 

When Savinien had described his mother and her cap and 
bows, her little house with its three windows fronting on the 
Rue des Bourgeois, with no garden but a yard with a well, 
and an outhouse to hold fire-logs ; when he had estimated the 
value of this dwelling, built of rough stone set in reddish 
cement, and that of the farm of Bordieres, the three dandies 
8 


114 


URSULE MIROUET. 


exchanged glances, and, with a look of deep meaning, quoted 
the word spoken by the abbe in Alfred de Musset’s play “ Les 
Marrons du feu” — for his “Contes d’Espagne” had just 
come out — 

“ Dismal ! ” 

“ Your mother would pay in response to a skillful letter? ” 
said Rastignac. 

“Yes; but after ?” cried de Marsay. 

“If you had only been put into the hackney coach,” said 
Lucien, “the King’s government would give you a berth in 
a foreign mission ; but Sainte-Pelagie is not the anteroom to 
an embassy.” 

“You are not up to the mark for life in Paris,” said Ras- 
tignac. 

“Let’s see,” de Marsay began, looking at Savinien from 
head to foot as a horse-dealer examines a horse. “You have 
good blue eyes well set, you have a well-shaped white fore- 
head, splendid black hair, a neat little mustache which looks 
well on your pale skin, and a slight figure ; your foot bespeaks 
a good breed, shoulders and chest strong, and not too like a 
coal-heaver’s. I should call you a good specimen of a dark 
man. Your face is in the style of that of Louis XIII.; not 
much color, and a well-shaped nose ; and you have besides 
the thing that appeals to woman, the indescribable something 
of which men themselves are never conscious, which is in the 
air, the walk, the tone of voice, the flash of the eyes, the 
gesture, a hundred little things which women see, and to 
which they attach a meaning which eludes us. You do not 
know yourself, my dear fellow. With a little style, in six 
months you could fascinate an Englishwoman with a hundred 
thousand francs, especially if you use the title of Vicomte de 
Portenduere to which you have a right. My charming mother- 
in-law, Lady Dudley, who has not her equal for skewering 
two hearts together, will discover the damsel for you in some 
alluvial district of Great Britain. But then you must be able 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


11 S 


to stave off your debts for ninety days, and know how to do 
it by some skillful stroke of high finance. Oh ! why did you 
say nothing of it to me ? At Baden these money-lenders 
would have respected you, have served you perhaps ; but after 
clapping you in prison they despise you. The money-lender 
is like society, like the mob — on his knees to a man who is 
clever enough to take advantage of him, and pitiless to a lamb. 
In the eyes of a certain set, Sainte-Pelagie is a demon which 
takes the shine off a young man’s soul to a terrible extent. 
Will you have my opinion, my dear boy? I say to you as I 
did to little d’Esgrignon : Pay your debts cautiously, keeping 
enough to live on for three years, and get married in the 
country to the first girl who has thirty thousand francs a year. 
In three years you will be sure to have found some suitable 
heiress who will gladly hear herself called Madame de Porten- 
duere. These are the words of wisdom. Let us have a drink. 

I propose a toast : ‘ To the girl with money ! ’ 

The young men did not leave their ex-friend till the official 
hour of parting, and on the threshold of the gate they said to 
each other, “ He is not game ! He is very much crushed ! 

Will he pick himself up again ! ” 

The next day Savinien wrote to his mother, a general con- 
fession covering twenty-two pages. Madame de Portenduere, 
after crying for a whole day, wrote first to her son, promising 
to get him out of prison, and then to the Comtes de Por- 
tenduere and de Kergarouet. 

The letters the cure had just read, and which the poor 
mother now held in her hand, moist with her tears, had 
reached her that morning, and had almost broken her heart. 

“Paris, September , 1829. 

“ To Madame de Portenduere. 

“ Madame You cannot doubt the great interest which 
the admiral takes in your troubles. The news you write to 
M. de Kergarouet distresses me all the more because my house 


116 


URSULE MIROUET. 


was open to your son ; we were proud of him. If Savinien 
had had more confidence in the admiral, we would have taken 
him in charge, and he would now have a suitable appoint- 
ment ; but the unhappy boy told us nothing ! The admiral 
could not possibly pay a hundred thousand francs ; he is him- 
self in debt, and has involved himself for me, for I knew 
nothing of his pecuniary position. He regrets it all the more 
because Savinien, by allowing himself to be arrested, has for 
the moment tied our hands. If my handsome nephew had 
not felt for me some foolish passion which smothered the 
voice of relationship in the arrogance of a lover, we might 
have sent him to travel in Germany while his affairs here were 
being arranged. M. de Kergarouet might have asked for a 
place for his grand-nephew in the naval department ; but 
imprisonment for debt cannot fail to paralyze the admiral’s 
efforts. Pay off Savinien’s debts, let him go into the navy ; 
he will then make his way like a true Portenduere ; he has 
their fire in his fine black eyes, and we will all help him. 

“ So do not despair, madame ; you still have friends, 
among whom I beg to be accounted one of the sincerest, and 
I send you my best wishes with every respect. From your 
very devoted servant, 

“Emilie de Kergarouet.” 

“ Portenduere, August , 1829. 
“To Madame de Portenduere. 

“My dear Aunt: — I am as much vexed as pained by 
Savinien’s scapegrace doings. Married, as I am, the father 
of two sons and a daughter, my fortune, moderate indeed in 
comparison with my position and expectations, does not allow 
of my reducing it by such a sum as a hundred thousand francs 
to ransom a Portenduere captive to the Lombards. Sell your 
farm, pay his debts, and come to Portenduere ; you will here 
find the welcome due to you from us, even if our hearts were 
not wholly yours. You will live happy, and we will find a 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


117 


wife for Savinien, whom my wife thinks charming. This dis- 
aster is nothing; do not let it distress you; it will never be 
heard of in our remote district, where we know several girls 
with money — nay, very rich — who will be enchanted to belong 
to us. 

“ My wife joins me in assuring you how happy you would 
make us, and begs you to accept her hopes that this plan may 
be carried out, with the assurance of our affectionate respect. 

“ Luc-Savinien, Comte de Portenduere.” 

“What letters to write to a Kergarouet! ” cried the old 
Bretonne, wiping her eyes. 

“ The admiral does not know that his nephew is in prison,” 
said the Abb6 Chaperon presently. “Only the Countess has 
read your letter, and she alone has answered it. But some- 
thing must be done,” he added after a pause, “ and this is the 
advice I have the honor to offer you. Do not sell your farm. 
The present lease is nearly out ; it. has been running four-and- 
twenty years ; in a few months you can raise the rent to six 
thousand francs, and demand a premium equal to two years’ 
rent. Borrow from some honest man — not from the towns- 
people, who make a traffic of mortgages. Your neighbor, 
now, is a worthy man, a man of the world, who knew the 
upper classes before the Revolution, and who from being an 
atheist has become a Catholic. Do not feel any repugnance 
for coming to call on him this evening ; he will be deeply 
sensible of your taking such a step ; forget for one moment 
that you are a Kergarouet.” 

“ Never ! ” said the old mother in a strident tone. 

“At any rate, be an amiable Kergarouet. Come when he 
is alone; he will only take three-and-a-half per cent., perhaps 
not more than three, and he will do you the service in the 
most delicate manner. You will be quite satisfied with him. 
He will go himself to release Savinien, for he will be obliged 
to sell some securities, and he will bring him home to you.” 


118 


URSULE Ml ROUE T. 


“Do you mean that little Minoret?” 

“ Little Minoret is eighty-three years of age,” replied the 
* abbe with a smile. “ My dear lady, have a little Christian 
charity; do not hurt his feelings, as he may be useful to you 
in more ways than one." 

“ How, may I ask ? ” 

“Well, he has living with him an angel, the heavenliest 
young girl ” 

“ Yes, that little Ursule. Well, and what then ? ” 

The poor cure dared say no more as he heard this inflected 
interrogation. 

“ Well, what then ?” Its harsh severity cut short before- 
hand the proposal he had been about to make. 

“Doctor Minoret is, I believe, exceedingly rich ” 

“So much the better for him.” 

“You have already been the indirect cause of your son’s 
present misfortunes by giving him no opening in life. Beware 
for the future,” said the abbe sternly. “Shall I announce 
your proposed visit to your neighbor? ” 

“But why, if he were told that I want him, should he not 
come to me ? ” 

“Well, madame, if you go to him, you will pay three per 
cent., and if he comes to you, you will pay five,” said the 
abbe, hitting on this argument to persuade the old lady. 
“And if you should be forced to sell your farm through 
Dionis the notary, or Massin the clerk, who would refuse to 
advance money in the hope of profiting by your disaster, you 
would lose half the value of Les Bordieres. I have not the 
smallest influence over the Dionis, the Massins, the Levraults, 
rich country folks who covet your farm, and know that your 
son is in prison.” 

“ They know it ! They know it ! ” she cried, throwing up 
her hands. “ Oh, my poor friend, you have let your coffee 
get cold. Tiennette ! Tiennette ! ” 

Tiennette, an old Brittany peasant of sixty, in the jacket 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


119 


and cap of her province, hastened in and took the cure’s 
coffee to heat it again. 

“ Wait a minute, Monsieur le Recteur,” said she, seeing 
that the curd was about to drink it. “ I will heat it in a bain- 
marie, and it will be none the worse.” 

“Very well, then,” the priest began again, in his persuasive 
voice, “I will give the doctor notice of your intended visit, 
and you will come.” 

The old lady still would not give in till at the end of an 
hour’s discussion, during which the cure was forced to repeat 
his arguments ten times over. And even then the haughty 
daughter of the Kergarouets only yielded to these last words — 

“ Savinien would go ! ” 

“ Then it had better be I,” said she. 

Nine o’clock was striking when the little door in the great 
gate was closed behind the cure, who forthwith rang eagerly 
at the doctor’s entrance. The Abbe Chaperon escaped Tien- 
nette to fall on La Bougival, for the old nurse said to him — 

“ You are very late, Monsieur le Cure.” Just as Tiennette 
had said, “Why have you left madame so early when she is 
in trouble ? ” 

The cure found a large party in the doctor’s green and 
brown drawing-room ; for Dionis had been to reassure his 
heirs on his way to see Massin, and repeat to him his uncle’s 
words. 

“Ursule,” said he, “has I suspect a love in her heart 
which will bring her nothing but sorrow and care. She seems 
to be romantic ” — the word applied by notaries to a sensitive 
nature — “and she will long remain unmarried. So do not be 
suspicious ; pay her all sorts of little attentions, and be the 
humble servants of your uncle, for he is sharper than a hun- 
dred Goupils,” added the notary, not knowing that Goupil is 
a corrupt form of the Latin vulpes , a fox. 

So Mesdames Massin and Cretniere, their husbands, the 
postmaster and Desird, with the town doctor and Bongrand, 


120 


URSULE MIROUET. 


formed an unwonted and turbulent crowd at the old doctor’s. 
As the abbe went in he heard the sound of a piano. Poor 
Ursule was ending Beethoven’s sonata in A. With the art- 
fulness permissible to the innocent, the girl, enlightened by 
her godfather, and averse to the family, had selected this 
solemn music, which must be studied to be appreciated, to 
disgust these women with their wish to hear her. The finer 
the music, the less the ignorant enjoy it. So, when the door 
opened, and the Abbe Chaperon put in his venerable head, 
“Ah ! here is Monsieur le Cure! ” they all exclaimed, de- 
lighted to have to rise and put an end to their torment. 

The exclamation found an echo at the card-table, where 
Bongrand, the town doctor, and the old man himself were 
victims to the audacity with which the tax-collector, to court 
his great-uncle, had proposed to take the fourth hand at whist. 
Ursule came away from the piano. The doctor also rose as 
if to greet the priest, but in fact to put a stop to the game. 
After many compliments to their uncle on his goddaughter’s 
proficiency, the heirs took their leave. 

“ Good-night, friends,” cried the doctor, as the gate shut. 

“ So that is what costs so dear ! ” said Madame Cremiere 
to Madame Massin, when they had gone a little way. 

“'God forbid that I should pay any money to hear my 
little Aline make such a noise as that in the house !” replied 
Madame Massin. 

“She said it was by Beethoven, who is supposed to be a 
great composer,” said the tax-collector. “He has a great 
name.” 

“ My word ! not at Nemours,” cried Madame Cremiere. 

“ I believe my uncle arranged it on purpose that we should 
never go there again,” said Massin. “For he certainly 
winked as he pointed out the green volume to that little 
minx.” 

“ If that is the only tune they care to dance to, they are 
wise to keep themselves to themselves,” said the postmaster. 


TIIE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


121 


“ The justice must be very fond of his game to listen to 
those rigmarole pieces,” said Madame Cremiere. 

“ I shall never be able to play to people who do not under- 
stand music,” said Ursule, taking her seat near the card-table. 

“ In persons of a rich organization feeling can only express 
itself among congenial surroundings,” said the cure. “Just 
as a priest can give no blessing in the presence of the evil 
one, and as a chestnut tree dies in a heavy soil, so a musician 
of genius feels himself morally routed when he is among 
ignorant listeners. In the arts we need to receive from the 
souls in which our souls find their medium as much power as 
we can impart. The axiom, which is a law of human affec- 
tions, has given rise to the proverbs :* 1 We must howl with 
the wolves;’ ‘Like to like.’ But the discomfort you must 
have felt is known only to tender and sensitive natures.” 

“Ay, my friends,” said the doctor, “and a thing which 
might only annoy another woman could kill my little Ursule. 
Ah ! when I am no more, raise up between this tender flower 
and the world such a sheltering hedge as Catullus speaks of — 
Ut flos , etc.” 

“ And yet the ladies were flattering in their remarks to you, 
Ursule,” said the lawyer, smiling. 

“ Coarsely flattering,” observed the town doctor. 

“ I have always felt such coarseness in insincere praise,” 
replied Monsieur Minoret. “And why?” 

,“ A true thought has its own refinement,” said the abbe. 

“Did you dine with Madame de Portenduere ? ” said 
Ursule, questioning the Abbe Chaperon, with a glance of 
anxious curiosity. 

“Yes; the poor lady is in much distress, and it is not 
impossible that she may call on you this evening, Monsieur 
Minoret.” 

“If she is in trouble and needs me, I will go to her,” said 
the doctor. “ Let us finish the first rubber.” 


122 


URSULE MIROUET. 


Ursule pressed her uncle’s hand under the table. 

“ Her son,” said the justice, “was rather too simple to 
live in Paris without a mentor. When it came to my knowl- 
edge that inquiries were being made of the notary here about 
the old lady’s farm, I guessed that he was borrowing on his 
reversion.” 

“ Do you think him capable of that? ” said Ursule, with a 
terrible flash at Monsieur Bongrand, who said to himself, 
“Yes, alas ! she is in love with him.” 

“ Yes and No,” said the town doctor. “There is good in 
Savinien, and the proof of it is that he is in prison. A 
thorough rogue never gets caught.” 

“My friends,” said old Minoret, “enough of this for this 
evening. We must not leave a poor mother to weep for a 
minute longer when we can dry her tears.” 

The four friends rose and went out. Ursule accompanied 
them as far as the gate, watched her godfather and the cure 
while they knocked at the door opposite ; and when liennette 
had admitted them, she sat down on one of the stone piers in 
the courtyard, La Bougival standing near her. 

“Madame la Vicomtesse,” said the cure, going first into 
the little room, “ Doctor Minoret could not allow you to have 
the trouble of going to his house ” 

“I am too much of the old school, madame,” the doctor 
put in, “ not to know what is due from a man to a person 
of your rank, and I am only too happy to think, from what 
Monsieur le Cure tells me, that I may be of some service to 
you.” 

Madame de Portenduere, on whom the arrangement she 
had agreed to weighed so heavily, that, since the abbe had 
quitted her, she had thought of applying rather to the notary, 
was so surprised by Minoret’s delicate feeling, that she rose to 
return his bow, and pointed to an arm-chair. 

“Be seated, monsieur,” said she, with a royal air. “ Our 
dear cure will have told you that the Vicomte is in prison for 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


123 


debt — a young man’s debts — a hundred thousand francs. If 
you could lend him the sum, I would give you as security my 
farm at Bordi^res.” 

“We can talk of that, madame, when I shall have brought 
you back your son, if you will allow me to represent you in 
these circumstances.” 

“ Very good, monsieur,” replied the old lady, with a bow, 
and a glance at the cure, which was meant to convey : “ You 
are right; he is a man of good breeding.” 

“ My friend, the doctor, as you see, madame, is full of devo- 
tion to your family.” 

“We shall be grateful to you, monsieur,” said Madame 
de Portenduere, with a visible effort, “for at your age to 
venture through Paris on the tracks of a scapegrace’s mis- 
deeds ” 

“Madame, in ’65, I had the honor of seeing the illustrious 
Admiral de Portenduere at the house of the worthy Monsieur 
de Malesherbes, and at that of the Comte de Buffon, who 
was anxious to question him as to various curious facts in 
his voyages. It is not impossible that Monsieur de Porten- 
du£re, your late husband, may have been there too. The 
French navy was then in its glory ; it held its own against 
England, and the captain contributed his quota of courage to 
the game. How impatiently, in ’83 and ’84, did we await 
news from the camp of Saint-Roch ! I was very nearly joining 
as surgeon to the King’s forces. Your grand-uncle, Admiral 
de Kergarouet, who is still living, fought his great battle at 
that time, for he was on board the ‘ Belle Poule.’ ” 

“ Ah ! if he knew that his grand-nephew was in prison ? ” 
replied Madame de Portenduere. 

“The Vicomte will no longer be there two days hence,” 
said old Minoret, rising. 

He put out his hand to take the old lady’s, who allowed 
him to do so; he kissed it respectfully, bowed low, and went 
out ; but he came in again to say to the curd — 

R 


124 


URSULE MIROUET. 


“ Will you, my dear abbe, secure a place for me in the dili- 
gence for to-morrow morning? ” 

- The cur£ remained another half-hour to sing the praises of 
the doctor, who had intended to conquer the old lady, and 
had succeeded. 

“ He is wonderful for his age,” said she. ‘ ‘ He talks of 
going to Paris and settling my son’s affairs as if he were 
no more than five-and-twenty. He has moved in good so- 
ciety.” 

“In the best, madame ; and at this day, more than one 
son of an impoverished peer of France would be very happy 
to marry his ward with a million of francs. Ah, if such a 
notion should enter Savinien’s brain, times are so altered that 
the chief difficulties would not be raised on your side after 
your son’s conduct ! ” 

It was the intense amazement with which tl s old lady heard 
this speech that allowed the priest to finish it. 

“You have lost your wits, my dear Abbe Chaperon.” 

“ Think it over, madame ; and God grant that henceforth 
your son may behave in such a wav as to acquire that old 
man’s esteem ! ” 

“If it were not you, Monsieur le Cure,” said Madame de 
Portendu£re ; “ if it were any one else who spoke to me in 
these terms ” 

“ You would never see him again,” said the abb£, smiling. 
“We must hope that your dear son may enlighten you as to 
what is doing in Paris in the matter of marriages. You will 
consider Savinien’s happiness, and, after compromising his 
future, you will surely not interfere with his making himself a 
position?” 

“ And it is you who say this to me! ” responded Madame 
de Portenduere in amazement. 

“If I did not, who would?” cried the priest, rising and 
beating a prompt retreat. 

The cure saw Ursule and her godfather walking up and 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


125 


down the little courtyard. The submissive doctor had been 
so teased by his ward that he had at last yielded ; she wanted 
to go to Paris, and had found a thousand pretexts. He called 
the cure, who joined them, and the doctor begged him to 
engage the coup6 of the diligence for that very night if the 
coach-office were still open. 

At six o’clock on the following afternoon the old man and 
the young girl reached Paris, and the doctor went, the same 
evening, to consult his lawyer. Political events looked threat- 
ening. The justice at Nemours had been telling the doctor 
the day before, several times in the course of their conversa- 
tion, that he would be nothing less than mad to keep a penny 
in the funds so long as the quarrel between the Court and the 
Press should remain unsettled. Minoret’s notary approved 
of the advice indirectly given by Bongrand. So the doctor 
took advantage of his visit to Paris to sell out his commercial 
investments and state securities, which were all at a premium, 
and to deposit his capital in the bank. The lawyer also advised 
his old client to sell the shares left to Ursule by Monsieur Jordy, 
which, as a good trustee, he had invested. He promised to 
set to work, with the help of a very knowing agent, to come to 
terms with Savinien’s creditors ; but, to achieve every success, 
it was necessary that the young man should spend yet a few 
days in prison. 

“ Hurrying on these matters costs at least fifteen percent.,” 
said the lawyer to the doctor. “ And at any rate you cannot 
get at your money for seven or eight days.” 

When Ursule learned that Savinien would be in prison at 
least a week longer, she entreated her guardian to let her go 
there with him, if only for once. Old Minoret refused. The 
uncle and niece were lodging at an hotel in the Rue Croix- 
des-Petits- Champs, where the doctor had taken a suitable set 
of rooms ; and knowing his ward’s religious honor, he made 
her promise never to go out while he was absent on business. 
The kind old man took her for walks about Paris, showing 


126 


URSULE MIROUET 


her the arcades, the shops, the Boulevards — but nothing 
interested or amused her. 

“ What do you want ? ” asked he. 

“To see Sainte-Pelagie,” she persistently replied. 

Then Minoret hired a hackney coach, and took her to the 
Rue de la Clef, where the vehicle drew up in front of the 
squalid building — an ancient convent turned into a prison. 
The sight of the high gray walls, where every window was 
closely barred, of the low door, not to be entered without 
stooping — dreadful lesson ! — the gloomy mass standing in a 
neighborhood full of poverty, where it rises in the midst of 
deserted streets, itself the supreme misery ; the whole com- 
bination of dismal ideas choked Ursule, and made her shed 
tears. 

“ How is it,” said she, “ that young men can be imprisoned 
for money? How is it that a debt gives to a money-lender 
such power as the King himself does not possess ? And he is 
there!” she exclaimed. “Where, godfather?” she added, 
looking from one window to another. 

“Ursule,” said her godfather, “you make me commit 
follies. This is not forgetting him ! ” 

“But,” said she, “even if I must give him up, must I feel 
no interest in him ? I may love him, and marry no one.” 

“Oh ! ” cried the old man, “there is so much method in 
your madness, that I repent of having brought you.” 

Three days later the old man had the receipts in due form, 
the title-deeds, and all the documents which were necessary to 
liberate Savinien. The liquidation, including the agent’s 
commission, had been effected for the sum of eighty thousand 
francs. The doctor had in hand eight hundred thousand 
francs, which, by his lawyer’s advice, he placed in treasury 
notes, so as not to lose too much interest. He kept twenty 
thousand in bank-notes for Savinien. 

The doctor himself went to release him on Saturday at two 
o’clock, and the young Vicomte, already informed by a letter 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 127 

from his mother, thanked his deliverer with sincere effusive- 
ness of feeling. 

“ You must not delay in coming home to see your mother,” 
said old Minoret. 

Savinien replied, in some confusion, that even in prison he 
had contracted a debt of honor ; and he told the doctor of 
the visit of his three friends. 

“ I suspected you might have some personal debts,” said 
the doctor with a smile. “ Your mother has borrowed a 
hundred thousand francs, but I have paid no more than eighty 
thousand ; here is the remainder, use it with thrift, monsieur, 
and regard what is left as your stake on the green cloth of 
fortune.” 

During the past week Savinien had reflected on the times 
he lived in. Competition on all sides demands severe labor 
from those who hope to make a fortune. Illegal methods 
require more talent and underhand manoeuvres than enter- 
prise under the light of day. Success in the gay world, far 
from securing a position, absorbs time and a great deal of 
money. The name of Portendu£re, omnipotent according to 
his mother, was nothing in Paris. His cousin the deputy, the 
Comte de Portendu£re, cut but a small figure in the midst of 
the elective Chamber in comparison with the peerage and the 
court, and had no more influence than enough for himself. 
Admiral Kergarouet existed only in the person of his wife. 
He had seen orators, men who had risen from a social rank 
beneath the nobility or the simple gentry, become personages 
of importance. In short, money was the pivot, the only 
means, the only motor of a society which Louis XVIII. had 
tried to form in imitation of that of England. 

On his way from the Rue de la Clef to the Rue Croix-des- 
Petits-Champs, the young gentleman summed up his medita- 
tions, and laid them before the old doctor, in accordance with 
de Marsay’s advice. 

“ I must let myself be forgotten,” said he, “ for three or 


128 


URSULE MIROU&V 


four years, and try to find a career. Perhaps I may make a 
name in political diplomacy or in moral statistics, by some 
treatise on one of the great questions of the day. At any rate, 
while finding some young person whom I may marry, and 
whose position may qualify me for election, I shall work in 
silence and obscurity.” 

The doctor studied the young man’s countenance, and saw 
in it the fixed purpose of a man who, having been wounded, 
hopes for revenge. He greatly approved this scheme. 

“ My young neighbor,” said he, “ if you have cast the skin 
of the old nobility — which is not found to be good wear 
nowadays — after three or four years of a steady industrious 
life, I will undertake to find you a superior girl, pretty, amia- 
ble, pious, and with a fortune of seven or eight hundred 
thousand francs, who will make you happy, and of whom you 
may be proud, though she has no nobility but that of the 
heart.” 

“ Eh, doctor ! ” cried the young man, “ there is no nobility 
left — only an aristocracy.” 

“ Go and pay your debts of honor, and return here. I will 
go to engage the coup6 of the diligence, for my ward is with 
me,” said the old man. 

That evening, at six o’clock, the three travelers set out 
from the Rue Dauphine by the “ Dueler.” Ursule, who wore 
a veil, spoke not a word. After blowing her the kiss in an 
impulse of trivial flirtation, which had upset Ursule as much as 
a whole book of love, Savinien had totally forgotten the 
doctor’s ward in the torments of his debts ; and, indeed, his 
hopeless adoration of Emilie de Kergarouet did not suffer him 
to bestow a remembrance on the glances he had interchanged 
with a mere little girl at Nemours. So he did not recognize 
her when the old man made her get first into the coach and 
sat next her, dividing her from the young Vicomte. 

“I have accounts to settle with you,” said the doctor to 
the youth ; “ I have all your papers here.” 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


129 


“I was within an ace of not getting away,” said Savinien. 
“ I had to order clothes and linen ; the Philistines have 
robbed me of everything, and I am in the state of the prod- 
igal son.” 

However interesting the subjects of conversation between 
the old man and the young one, however pertinent some of 
Savinien’s remarks, the young girl sat in silence till it was 
dark, her green veil hiding her face, and her hands folded over 
her shawl. 

‘‘You do not seem to have found Paris very delightful, 
mademoiselle,” said Savinien at last, somewhat piqued. 

“I am glad to return to Nemours,” she replied, in an 
agitated voice, putting up her veil. 

In spite of the gloom, Savinien now recognized her by 
her thick plaits of hair and brilliant blue eyes. 

“And, for my part, I can leave Paris without regret to 
bury myself at Nemours, since I there shall find so fair a 
neighbor,” said he. “I hope, Monsieur le Docteur, that 
you will allow me to visit you ; I am fond of music, and I 
remember hearing Mademoiselle Ursule’s piano.” 

“ I hardly know, monsieur,” said the doctor gravely, 
“whether your mother will be pleased that you should come 
to see an old man who is obliged to have a mother’s care 
of this dear child. ” 

This measured reply gave Savinien much to think about ; 
he now recollected that kiss, so lightly wafted. 

It was now night ; the heat was oppressive ; the doctor 
and Savinien were the first to fall asleep. Ursule, who re- 
mained a long time awake, her head full of plans, succumbed 
about midnight. She had taken off her little hat of coarse 
straw plait. Her head, in a little cap of embroidered muslin, 
presently dropped on to her godfather’s shoulder. At day- 
break, near Bouron, Savinien woke the first. He saw Ursule 
in the untidy state produced by the jolting of the coach; her 
cap was tumbled and askew ; her hair had come unpinned, 
9 


130 


URSULE MJROUET. 


and the plaits fell about her face, which was rosy with the 
heat ; but in this disorder, which is horrible in a woman to 
whom dress is indispensable, youth and beauty are triumphant. 
The sleep of innocence is always lovely. Her parted lips 
showed pretty teeth; her shawl, thrown back, allowed him to 
observe, without offense to Ursule, the grace of her figure 
under the folds of a full bodice of flowered muslin. And 
through the countenance shone the purity of the maiden’s 
soul, all the more visible because no other expression mingled 
with it. Old Minoret, who presently woke, arranged her 
head against the corner of the coach to make her more com- 
fortable ; and she did not even feel what he did, so soundly 
was she sleeping, after spending so many nights in thinking 
of Savinien’s misfortunes. 

“ Poor little thing ! ” said he to his companion, “ she sleeps 
like a child — as she is.” 

“ You should be proud of her,” said Savinien, ‘‘for she 
seems to be as good as she is pretty.” 

“Ah! she is the light of the house! If she were my 
daughter, I could not love her better. She will be sixteen on 
the 5th of February next. God grant I may live to see her 
married to a man who will make her happy ! I wanted to 
take her to the play in Paris, where she had never been be- 
fore ; she would not go ; the cure at Nemours had forbidden 
it. ‘But,’ said I, ‘when you are married, if your husband 
wishes to take you ? ’ ‘I shall do whatever my husband 
desires,’ said she. ‘ If he should ask me to do anything 
wrong, and I should be so weak as to obey him, he will be 
held responsible before God ; but I should find strength to 
resist — in his interest, of course.’ ” ^ 

As they reached Nemours, at five in the morning, Ursule 
woke up, quite ashamed of her untidiness, and of meeting 
Savinien’s gaze of frank admiration. During the hour which 
the diligence took to drive from Bouron, where it had stopped 
a few minutes, the young man had fallen in love with Ursule. 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


131 


He had studied the innocence of her soul, the beauty of her 
person, the whiteness of her complexion, the delicacy of her 
features, and the sweet voice which had spoken the brief ex- 
pressive phrase in which the poor child had told everything 
while intending to tell nothing. In short, I know not what 
presentiment led him to think of Ursule as the wife the 
doctor had suggested to him, set in a gold frame by the 
magical words — “Seven or eight hundred thousand francs.” 

“In three or four years she will be twenty; I shall be 
twenty-seven. The good man spoke of struggles, of work, of 
good behavior. However cunning he may be, he will end by 
telling me his secret.” 

The neighbors parted before their respective houses, and 
Savinien put much meaning into his leave-taking, with a 
glance at Ursule full of imploring invitation. 

Madame de Portenduere left her son to sleep till noon. 
The doctor and Ursule, in spite of their fatiguing journey, 
went to high mass. 

Savinien’s release, and his return in the doctor’s company, 
had explained the object of his journey to the parochial poli- 
ticians and to his heirs, who had met in council in the church 
square, as they had done a fortnight since. To the great 
surprise of all parties, on coming out of church, Madame de 
Portenduere stopped old Minoret, who offered her his arm, 
and conducted her home. The old lady wished to invite him 
and his ward to dinner that same day, telling him that the 
cur6 would be her other guest. 

“ He wanted to let Ursule see Paris,” said Minoret-Levrault. 

“ Damnation ! The old man cannot stir a step without 
his little housekeeper,” cried Cremiere. 

“There must have been some very private transactions 
between them, for Mother Portenduere to take his arm,” 
observed Massin. 

“ It has not occurred to you that your uncle has sold his 
investments and taken the young ’un out of quod ! ” cried 


132 


URSULE MIROUET. 


Goupil. “ He refused my master, but he did not refuse his 

madame Ah ! your goose is cooked ! The Vicomte 

will propose a marriage-contract instead of a promise to pay, 
and the doctor will make the husband settle on his god- 
daughter all the money he will have to give her to secure such 
a match.” 

“ It would not be such a bad stroke of business to marry 
Ursule to Monsieur Savinien,” said the butcher. “The old 
lady is having them to dine with her to-day ; Tiennette came 
over to me at five in the morning to secure a fillet of beef.” 

“ Well, Dionis, this is a pretty piece of work ! ” said Mas- 
sin, hurrying to meet the notary, who came out on to the 
square. 

“Why, what’s wrong?” said the notary. “All is well; 
your uncle has sold his securities, and Madame de Porten- 
duere has asked me to go to her house to witness a deed 
acknowledging a loan of a hundred thousand francs from your 
uncle on a mortgage of her estates.” 

“Yes; but if the young folks were to marry each other?” 

“ You might as well say if Goupil were to be my successor,” 
said the notary. 

“ Neither case is impossible,” said Goupil. 

On returning from mass, the old lady sent Tiennette to 
desire her son to come to her room. 

The little house had three rooms on the ground floor. 
Those of Madame de Portenduere and of her deceased husband 
were on the same side of the house, divided by a dressing- 
room with a borrowed light, and a small anteroom opening 
on to the stairs. The window of the third room, which had 
always been Savinien’s, looked out on the street, as did that 
of his father’s. The staircase lay behind it in such a way as 
to leave space for a little dressing-room adjoining, with a 
small round window to the courtyard. 

Madame de Portendudre’s room, the gloomiest in the house, 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


133 


also looked on the yard ; but the widow spent her life in the 
sitting-room on the ground floor, which communicated by a 
passage with the kitchen built on the farther side of the court- 
yard ; so that this room did duty both as drawing-room and 
dining-room. 

The room that had been Monsieur de Portenduere’s re- 
mained in the state in which it had been left on the day of 
his death ; the dead man alone was missing. Madame de 
Portenduere herself had made the bed, and laid upon it the 
captain’s uniform, with her husband’s sword, red ribbon, 
orders and hat. The gold snuff-box out of which the Vicomte 
had taken his last pinch of snuff was on the table by the bed, 
with his prayer-book, his watch, and the cup he used to drink 
out of. His white hair, arranged in a frame in a single thick 
curl, hung above the crucifix and holy-water cup over the bed. 
Finally, the trifling objects of his daily use were all in their 
place — his papers, furniture, Dutch spittoon, and field-glass 
hanging over the fireplace. The widow had stopped the 
antique clock at the hour of his death, which it thus recorded 
in perpetuity. The scent of his powder and snuff still hung 
in the air. The hearth was as he had left it. To go into the 
room was like seeing him again, on finding all the things that 
thus spoke of his habits. Plis tall cane with its gold knob 
still lay where he had left it, and his large doeskin gloves 
close beside it. On the console stood a vase of solid gold, 
coarsely executed, but worth a thousand crowns, a present 
from the port of Havana, which he had protected during the 
war of American Independence from an attack of the English, 
holding his own against a superior force, after getting the 
vessels under his convoy safe into harbor. As a reward the 
King of Spain had made him Knight of the Spanish Orders. 
For this achievement he was promoted on the first oppor- 
tunity to the command of a squadron, and received the order 
of the Legion of Honor. 

Then, on his next leave, he married his wife, with a for- 


134 


URSULE MIR O VET. 


tune of two hundred thousand francs. But the Revolution 
stopped all further promotion, and Monsieur de Portenduere 
emigrated. 

“ Where is my mother?” asked Savinien of Tiennette, on 
making his appearance. 

“ She is waiting for you in your father’s room,” said the old 
Bretonne. 

Savinien could not repress a little shudder. He knew how 
rigid were his mother’s principles, her worship of honor, her 
loyalty, her faith in noble blood, and he foresaw a scene. So 
he went as if to lead a forlorn hope, his heart beating and 
his face almost pallid. In the twilight that filtered through 
the Venetian shutters he saw his mother dressed in black, and 
wearing a solemn mien in harmony with this chamber of the 
dead. 

“ Monsieur le Vicomte,” she said, rising as he entered and 
taking his hand to lead him to the bedside, “there your 
father died — a man of honor ; died without having anything 
to reproach himself with. His spirit is above. He must 
indeed have groaned there to see his son disgraced by im- 
prisonment for debt. Under the old monarchy you would 
have been spared this mud-stain, by craving a lettre de cachet , 
by which you would have been shut up for a few days in a 
state prison. However, you now stand before your father, 
who can hear you. You, knowing all you had done before 
being taken to that squalid prison, can you swear to me, be- 
fore that shade, and before God who sees all things, that you 
have done no dishonorable action, that your debts were the 
consequence of a young man’s follies — in short, that your 
honor is unspotted ? If your blameless father were there, 
alive, in that armchair, if he could call you to account for 
your conduct, would he, after hearing you, embrace you 
still?” 

“ Yes, mother,” said the young man, with the most respect- 
ful gravity. 


THE HEIRS IN ALARM. 


135 


She opened her arms and clasped her son to her heart, 
shedding a few tears. 

“Then let all be forgotten,” said she; “we have lost 
nothing but the money. I will pray to God that it may be 
restored to us ; and since you still are worthy of your name, 
kiss me, for I have suffered greatly.” 

“I swear to you, my dear mother,” said he, holding out 
his hand over the bed, “ never again to give you the least 
trouble of the same kind, and to do all in my power to repair 
my past errors.” 

“ Come to breakfast, my child,” she said, and she left the 
room. 

If the laws of the stage are to be applied to narrative, 
Savinien’s arrival, by introducing at Nemours the only actor 
as yet missing from the personages of this little drama, here 
completes the prologue. 



V 


II. 


THE MINORET PROPERTY. 

The action began with a scene so hackneyed in literature, 
whether old or new, that no one would believe in its effect in 
1829 if the principal figure were not an old lady of Brittany, 
a Kergarouet, and an emigree . But it must at once be made 
clear that in 1829 the nobility had reconquered in society 
some of the ground it had lost in political influence. More- 
over, the feeling which governs grandparents when matri- 
monial suitability is in question, is imperishable ; it is closely 
implicated with the existence of civilized society, and founded 
in family spirit. It is supreme at Geneva as at Vienna, and 
as at Nemours, where Z6lie Levrault had refused her consent 
to her son’s marrying the daughter of a bastard. 

Still, every social law has its exceptions. Savinien proposed 
trying to bend his mother’s pride before Ursule’s innate no- 
bility. The battle began forthwith. As soon as he was 
seated at table his mother began to tell him of the dreadful 
letters, as she called them, written to her by the Kergarouets 
and the Portendu£res. 

“ The family has ceased to exist, my dear mother,” replied 
Savinien. “ Nothing is left but the individual. The nobility 
no longer forms a compact body. Nowadays no one asks if 
you are a Portenduere, or if you are brave, or a statesman ; 
all that any one inquires is, 1 How much do you pay in rates 
and taxes? ’ ” 

“ And the King? ” asked the old lady. 

“ The King stands between the two Chambers, like a man 
between his lawful wife and his mistress. So I must contrive 
to marry some rich girl whatever her family may be — a peas- 
ant’s daughter if she has a million of francs, and if she is 
( 136 ) 




137 


THE MIN O RET PROPERTY. 

% 

fairly well brought up ; that is to say, if she comes from a 
convent-school.” 

“ This is quite another matter ! ” said the old lady. 

Savinien knit his brows over this reply. He knew that 
granite will, called Breton obstinacy, which characterized his 
mother; and was anxious to know, as soon as possible, what 
her views were on this delicate subject. 

“ And so,” said he, “if I should fall in love with a girl — 
say, for instance, our neighbor’s ward, little Ursule — you 
would oppose my marrying her? ” 

“To my dying day,” said she. “After my death you 
alone will be responsible for the honor and the blood of the 
Portendueres and the Kcrgarouets.” 

“ Then you would leave me to die of hunger and despair 
for the sake of a chimera which, in these days, can only be- 
come real by acquiring the splendor of wealth.” 

“You can serve France and trust in God.” 

“ You will postpone my happiness till the day after your 
death.” 

“It will be horrible on your part, that is all,” calmly re- 
plied his mother. 

“ Louis XIV. was very near marrying Mazarin’s niece — a 
parvenu.” 

“ Mazarin himself opposed it.” 

“ And the widow Scarron ? ” 

“ She was a d’Aubign6 ! Besides, the marriage was secret. 
But I am a very old woman, my son,” she added, shaking her 
head. “ When I am gone, you can marry to please your own 
fancy.” 

Savinien loved and respected his mother; but at once, 
though in silence, he set against the obstinacy of the daughter 
of the Kergarouets, an obstinacy equal to her own, and de- 
termined never to have any wife but Ursule, to whom this 
opposition gave all the charm of a forbidden joy — as always 
happens in such cases. 


138 


URSULE MIROUET. 


When, after vespers, Doctor Minoret, with Ursule, dressed 
in pink and white, entered the chilly sitting-room, the poor 
child was seized with nervous trembling, just as if she had 
found herself in the presence of the Queen of France, and 
had some favor to ask of her. Since her talk with the doc- 
tor, the little house had assumed, to her, the proportions of 
a palace, and the old lady all the social importance that a 
duchess must have had in the eyes of a villein’s daughter in 
the middle ages. Never had Ursule measured more hope- 
lessly the distance which divided a Vicomte de Portendudre 
from the daughter of a bandmaster, a singer in the opera, the 
natural son of an organist, herself living on the bounty of a 
physician. 

“ What ails you, child?” said the lady, making her sit 
down by her side. 

“ Madame, I am overcome by the honor you condescend 
to pay me.” 

“ Why, child,” replied Madame de Portendudre in her 
most vinegary accent, “ I know how much your guardian loves 
you, and I wish to do what is agreeable to him, for he has 
brought home the prodigal son.” 

“But, my dear mother,” said Savinien, for it went to his 
heart to see Ursule’s deep blushes, and the terrible effort by 
which she repressed her tears, “ even if you were under no 
obligation to Monsieur Minoret, it seems to me we might 
be gratified by the pleasure mademoiselle is good enough to 
do us by accepting your invitation.” And the young man 
pressed the doctor’s hand with meaning as he added — 

“ You, monsieur, wear the order of Saint Michael, the oldest 
French order, which in itself confers nobility.” 

Ursule’s great beauty, to which her almost hopeless love 
had, within the last few days, given the depth of expression 
which the greatest painters have always stamped on those 
portraits in which the soul is made strongly visible, had sud- 
denly struck Madame de Portenduere, and led her to suspect 


THE MIN O RET PROPERTY. 


139 


some ambitious interest under the doctor’s generosity. And 
the speech to which Savinien had replied was uttered with a 
pointedness that wounded the old man in what was dearest 
to him. Still, he could not forbear from smiling as he heard 
himself addressed as “ Chevalier” by Savinien, and discerned 
in this audacious exaggeration a lover’s fearlessness of the 
ridiculous. 

‘‘The order of Saint Michael, to obtain which so many 
follies were committed of old, is fallen, Monsieur le Vicomte,” 
replied the old court physician. “ Fallen, like so many other 
privileges ! It is no longer bestowed on any but doctors and 
poor artists. And so kings have done well to unite it to that 
of Saint Lazarus, a saint who was, I believe, an unhappy 
wretch brought back to life by a miracle ! Viewed in this 
light, the order of Saint Michael and Saint Lazarus to us may 
be symbolical.” 

After this reply, full of irony and dignity, silence reigned, 
no one caring to break it ; and it was becoming uncomfort- 
able, when a knock was heard. 

“Here is our good cur£,” said the old lady, rising, and 
leaving Ursule to herself, while she went forward to receive 
the priest — an honor she had not paid to Ursule or the doctor. 

Minoret smiled as he looked from his ward to Savinien. 
To complain or to take offense at Madame de Portenduere’s 
bad manners was a rock on which a small mind might have 
run aground ; but the old man had too much breeding not 
to avoid it. He began talking to the Vicomte of the danger 
Charles X. was in at that time, after intrusting the direction 
of his policy to the Prince de Polignac. When a long enough 
time had elapsed to obviate any appearance of retaliation on 
the old lady by speaking of business matters, he handed to 
her, almost jestingly, the documents of the prosecution and 
the receipted bills which proved the accounts drawn up by 
the lawyer. 

“My son acknowledges them?” she asked with a glance 


140 


UR SULK MIROUET. 


at Savinien, who bowed in reply. “Well, then, they can be 
handed to Dionis,” and she pushed away the papers, treat- 
ing the affair with the contempt due in her eyes to money 
matters. 

To look down on wealth was, in Madame de Portenduere’s 
opinion, to enhance nobility, and leave the middle class with- 
out a foot to stand on. 

A few minutes later Goupil called on behalf of his master, 
to ask for the accounts as between Savinien and Monsieur 
Minoret. 

“And what for?” asked the old lady. 

“ To serve as a basis for the mortgage deed; there is no 
direct payment of money,” replied the clerk, looking inso- 
lently about him. 

Ursule and Savinien, who looked in this odious person’s 
face for the first time, felt such a sensation as is produced by 
a toad, aggravated by a sense of ill omen. They both had 
that indefinable and vague anticipation of the future which has 
no name in speech, but which might be accounted for by an 
impulse of that inner self of which the Swedenborgian had 
spoken to Doctor Minoret. A conviction that this venomous 
Goupil would be fatal to them made Ursule quake ; but she 
got over her agitation as she perceived with unspeakable joy 
that Savinien shared her feelings. 

“Monsieur Dionis’ clerk is not a handsome man,” said 
Savinien, when Goupil shut the door. 

“What can it matter whether people of that class are ugly 
or handsome? ” said Madame de Portendu£re, with an eleva- 
tion of her eyebrows. 

“ I have no objection to his ugliness,” said the cure, “ but 
only to his malignity, which is unbounded, and he adds to it 
by villainy.” 

In spite of his wish to be amiable, the doctor grew cold 
and dignified, the lovers were uncomfortable. But for the 
simple good-humor of the Abb6 Chaperon, whose gentle 


THE M /NO RET PROPERTY. 


141 


cheerfulness made the dinner lively, the position of the doctor 
and his ward would have been almost intolerable. 

At dessert, seeing Ursule turn pale, he said to her, “ If you 
do not feel well, my child, there is only the street to cross.” 

“ What ails you, my dear? ” said the old lady to the girl. 

“ Unfortunately, madamc,” said the doctor severely, “her 
soul feels chilled, accustomed as she is to see nothing but 
smiles.” 

“A bad education, monsieur,” said Madame de Porten- 
du£re. “ Do you not think so, Monsieur le Cur£? ” 

“ Yes, madame,” Minoret put in, with a glance at the curd, 
who could not say a word. “ I have, I see, made life impossi- 
ble to this seraphic nature if she were to be cast on the world ; 
but before I die, I will find means to protect her from cold- 
ness, indifference, and hatred ” 

“ Godfather ! I beg of you — that is enough. I feel nothing 
unpleasant here,” she said, ready to meet Madame de Porten- 
du£re’s eye rather than lend too much meaning to her words 
by looking at Savinien. 

“ Whether Mademoiselle Ursule is uncomfortable I know 
not, madame,” said Savinien to his mother, “but I know that 
you are torturing me.” 

On hearing this speech, wrung from the generous young 
man by his mother’s behavior, Ursule turned pale ; she begged 
Madame de Portendu£re to excuse her, rose, took her guardian’s 
arm, courtesied, and went out. Then, as soon as she was at 
home, she rushed into the drawing-room, and, sitting down by 
the piano, hid her face in her hands and burst into tears. 

“ Why will you not leave it to my long experience to guide 
your feelings, cruel child?” cried the doctor in despair. 
“ The nobility never think themselves under any obligation 
towards us of the middle class. In serving them, we do no 
more than our duty, that is all. Besides, the old lady per- 
ceived that Savinien looked at you with pleasure ; she is afraid 
lest he should fall in love with you.” 


142 


UR SULK MIROUET. 

“ At any rate, he is safe ! ” she said. “But to try to set 
down such a man as you are ! ” 

“Wait till I come back, my child.” 

When the doctor returned to Madame de Portenduere’s he 
found Dionis there, and with him Monsieur Bongrand, and 
Levrault the mayor, the witnesses required by law to give 
validity to acts drawn up in communes where there is no 
official above a notary. Minoret led Dionis aside and spoke 
a word in his ear, after which the notary read the deed of 
mortgage ; Madame de Portenduere pledged all her property 
until the hundred thousand francs loaned by the doctor to the 
Vicomte should be repaid, with the interest, calculated at five 
per cent. When reading this clause, the cur£ looked at 
Minoret, who answered the abb6 by an approving nod. The 
good priest went to speak a few words to the lady in a low 
voice, and she replied quite audibly — 

“I do not choose to owe anything to people of that kind.” 

“My mother leaves the pleasantest part to me,” said 
Savinien to the doctor. “ She will pay you all the money, 
and leave it to me to be grateful.” 

“But you will have to find eleven thousand francs the first 
year,” observed the cure, “ to pay the law costs.” 

“ Monsieur,” said Minoret to Dionis, “as Monsieur and 
Madame de Portenduere are not in a position to pay for the 
registration, add the costs to the capital sum, and I will pay 
them.” 

Dionis made some calculations, and the whole sum was 
fixed at a hundred and seven thousand francs. When all the 
documents were signed, Minoret pleaded fatigue, and with- 
drew at the same time as the notary and the witnesses. 

“ Madame,” said the abb£, who remained with the Vicomte, 
“ why affront that excellent Minoret, who has saved you at 
least twenty-five thousand francs in Paris, and who had the 
good feeling to leave twenty thousand in your son’s hands for 
his debts of honor ? ” 


THE MIN O RET PROPERTY. 


143 


“Your Minoret is a sly fox,” said she, taking a pinch of 
snuff. “ He knows very well what he is about.” 

“ My mother fancies that he wants to force me to marry his 
ward by swallowing up our farm, as if a Portenduere and the 
son of a Kergarouet could be made to marry against his 
will.” 

An hour later Savinien made his appearance at the doctor’s, 
where the heirs had come together, moved by curiosity. The 
arrival of the young Vicomte produced a great sensation, all 
the more because in each person it proceeded from a different 
emotion. Mesdemoiselles Cremidre and Massin whispered 
together, and stared at Ursule, who blushed. The mothers 
murmured to Desire that Goupil was very likely in the right 
as regarded the marriage. The eyes of all were then centred 
on the doctor, who did not rise to greet the young nobleman, 
but merely gave him a curt bow, without setting down his 
dice-box, for he was playing backgammon with Monsieur 
Bongrand. The doctor’s cold manner surprised them all. 

“ Ursule, my dear,” he said, “give us a little music. 

The young girl was only too happy to have some occupation ; 
and on seeing her hurry to the piano and turn over the green- 
bound volumes, the expectant heirs resigned themselves with 
expressions of pleasure to the torment and silence about to be 
inflicted on them, so eager were they to detect what was going 
on between their uncle and the Portendueres. 

It happens not unfrequently that a piece, poor enough in 
itself, but played by a young girl under the stress of deep 
feeling, may produce more impression than a grand overture 
pompously given by a fine orchestra. In all music there lies, 
besides the idea of the composer, the soul of the performer, 
who, by a privilege peculiar to this art alone, can lend purpose 
and poetry to phrases of no great intrinsic value. Chopin, in 
our day, proves the truth of this fact on the piano, a thankless 
instrument, as Paganini had already done on the violin. 
This great genius is not so much a musician as a soul, which 


144 


URSULE MIROUET. 


becomes incarnate, and which could express itself in any form 
of music, even in simple chords. 

Ursule, by her exquisite and perilous organization, belonged 
to this school of rare genius ; but old Schmucke, the master 
who came to her every Saturday, and who, during her stay in 
Paris, had gone to her every day, had developed his pupil’s 
gifts to the utmost perfection. “Rousseau’s Dream,” the 
piece Ursule now selected, one of Herold’s youthful compo- 
sitions, is not lacking in a certain fullness which the player can 
bring out ; Ursule gave it a variety of agitated feeling which 
justified the title of Caprice , which the fragment bears. By 
her playing, at once mellifluous and dreamy, her soul spoke to 
the soul of the young man, and wrapped him, as it were, in a 
cloud of almost visible thoughts. He, seated at the end of 
the piano, his elbow resting on the top, and his head sup- 
ported by his left hand, gazed in admiration at Ursule, whose 
eyes, fixed on the wainscot beyond, seemed to be questioning 
some mystic world. A man might have fallen desperately in 
love for less. 

True feelings have a magnetic power, and Ursule intended 
to reveal her soul to some extent, as a coquette dresses herself 
to attract. Savinien was admitted to that beautiful realm, 
carried away by her heart, which, in order to express itself, 
borrowed the power of the only art which speaks to the mind 
through the mind, without the aid of words, of color, or of 
form. Candor has the same power over men as childhood has, 
the same charms and irresistible attractions; and Uiaule had 
never been more candid than at this moment, when she was 
waking to a new life. 

The cure came to snatch the young man from his dreams 
by asking him to take the fourth hand at whist. Ursule went 
on playing ; the heirs left, with the exception of Desire, who 
remained to investigate the intentions of his uncle, of the 
Vicomte, and of Ursule. 

“You have as much talent as feeling, mademoiselle,” said 





HE GAZED IN ADMIRATION AT URSULE. 









THE MIN O RET PROPERTY. 


145 


Savinien, when the young girl closed the piano, and came to 
sit down by her godfather. “ Who is your master ? ” 

“A German who lives quite close to the Rue Dauphine, on 
the Quai-Conti,” said the doctor. “ If he had not been 
giving Ursule a lesson every day during our stay in Paris, he 
would have been here this morning.” 

“He is not only a great musician,” said Ursule, “but a 
man of the most adorable simplicity.” 

“ Such lessons must cost very dear ! ” cried Desir6. 

The players exchanged ironical glances. When the game 
was ended, the doctor, who had been thoughtful all the even- 
ing, turned to Savinien with the expression of a man grieved 
to fulfill a painful duty. 

“ Monsieur,” he said, “I am much gratified by the feeling 
which has prompted you to call on me so immediately ; but 
your mother ascribes to me a double purpose of an ignoble 
kind, and I should give her the right to do so if I did not beg 
of you to come here no more, in spite of the honor your 
visits do me, and the pleasure I should take in cultivating 
your society. My honor and my peace of mind require that 
we should give up all neighborly intercourse. Pray tell your 
mother that if I do not request her to honor us — my ward 
and myself — by dining with us next Sunday, it is because I 
am perfectly certain that on that day she would be indisposed.” 

The old man offered his hand to the Vicomte, who pressed 
it respectfully, and merely said, “ You are right, monsieur.” 

He went away, not without bowing to Ursule with an ex- 
pression of regret rather than of disappointment. D6sir6 left 
the room at the same moment, but he could not speak a word 
with him, for Savinien rushed home. 

For two days the coolness between the Portendueres and 
the doctor was the sole subject of conversation among the 
heirs, who did justice to the acumen of Dionis, and be- 
lieved that the inheritance was safe. And thus, in an age 
when ranks are leveled, when the mania for equality puts all 
10 


146 


UR SULK MIROUET. 

individuals on the same footing, and threatens every institu- 
tion, even military discipline — the last entrenchment of power 
in France ; when, consequently, passion finds no obstacles to 
be overcome but personal antipathies or inequality of fortune, 
the obstinacy of an old woman and the dignity of Doctor 
Minoret had raised between these two lovers barriers which, 
as usual, were fated to strengthen rather than to destroy their 
love. To an impassioned man a woman is worth just what 
she costs him ; now Savinien, foreseeing a struggle, efforts, 
and suspense, which already made the young girl precious to 
him, was determined to win her. Perhaps our feelings obey 
the law of nature as to the duration of all her creations — a 
long life has a long childhood. 

Next morning, on waking, Ursule and Savinien had the 
same idea. This community of feeling would give birth to 
love if it were not the most delightful proof of its existence. 
When the young girl opened her curtains a little way, so as to 
give her eyes exactly space enough to look across to Savinien’s 
room, she saw her lover’s face above the window-fastening 
opposite. When we remember the immense service done to 
lovers by windows, it seems quite natural that they should be 
taxed. After thus protesting against her godfather’s hard- 
heartedness, Ursule let the curtains fall to again, and opened 
the window to close the Venetians, through which she could 
see without being seen. She went up to her room at least 
seven or eight times in the course of the day, and always saw 
the young Vicomte writing, tearing up papers, and writing 
again — to her, no doubt ! 

Next morning, when La Bougival woke Ursule, she handed 
her the following letter : 

“ To Mademoiselle Ursule. 

“Mademoiselle: — I am under no misapprehension as to 
the suspicion of which a young man must be the object when 
he has placed himself in the position from which your guar- 


THE MI NO RET PROPERTY. 


147 


aian rescued me. I henceforth must offer better guarantees 
than another man ; hence, mademoiselle, it is with the great- 
est humility that I throw myself at your feet to avow my 
love. This declaration is not prompted by passion ; it is 
based on a certainty which will last my life through. A mad 
passion for my young aunt, Madame de Kergarouet, brought 
me to imprisonment \ will you not regard as a mark of the 
sincerest love the complete effacement of every memory, the 
substitution for that image in my heart of your own ? From 
the moment when I saw you asleep, and so lovely in your 
childlike slumbers, at Bouron, you have filled my soul as a 
queen holds possession of her realm. I will have no wife but 
you. You have every perfection I can look for in the woman 
who is to bear my name. The education you have received 
and the dignity of your soul qualify you for the highest posi- 
tion. But I am too diffident of myself to attempt to paint 
you to yourself ; I can only love you. After hearing you 
play last night, I remembered these lines, which seem to have 
been written on you : 

“ 1 Made to attract the heart and charm the eye, at once 
gentle and intellectual, witty and reasonable, as polished as 
though she had spent her life at courts, as simple as the re- 
cluse who has never seen the world, the fire of her soul is 
tempered in her eyes by divine modesty.' 

“I have felt the value of the beautiful soul which reveals 
itself in you by the smallest things. This is what gives me 
the courage to ask you — if as yet you love no one — to allow 
me to prove to you, by my care and my conduct, that I am 
worthy of you. My life depends on it ; you cannot doubt 
that all my powers shall be employed not merely to please 
you, but yet more to merit your esteem, which will to me 
outweigh that of all the rest of the world. In this hope, 
Ursule, if you will permit me so to name you in my heart 
as one I worship, Nemours will be my paradise, and the most 
difficult undertakings will only bring me joys which I shall 


148 


UR SOLE MIROUET. 


lay at your feet, as we lay all at the throne of God. Tell me, 
then, that I may call myself Your Savinien.” 

Ursule kissed this letter ; then, after reading it again, and 
clasping it with rapturous gestures, she dressed to go and 
show it to her godfather. 

“Gracious heaven ! I was on the point of going without 
saying my prayers ! ” she exclaimed, turning back and 
kneeling down on her prie-Dicu. 

A few minutes later she went down to the garden, where 
she found her guardian, to whom she gave Savinien’s letter 
to read. They sat down together on a bench under the 
clump of creepers facing the Chinese pavilion. Ursule waited 
for the old man to speak, and he sat meditating much too 
long a time for an impatient girl. Finally, the outcome of 
their secret conference was the following letter, which the 
doctor had no doubt dictated in part : 

“Monsieur: — I cannot fail to be much honored by the 
letter in which you offer me your hand ; but at my age, and 
in accordance with the rules I have been brought up in, I had 
to lay it before my guardian, who constitutes my whole 
family, and whom I love as both a father and a friend. 
These, then, are the painful objections he has raised, and 
which must serve as my reply. 

“ I, Monsieur le Vicomte, am but a poor girl, whose future 
fortune depends entirely not only on my godfather’s good-will, 
but also on the doubtful issue of the measures he can take to 
evade the ill-will towards me of his next-of-kin. Though I 
am the legitimate child of Joseph Mirouet, bandmaster to the 
45th Infantry Regiment, as he was my guardian’s illegitimate 
half-brother, a suit, however unreasonable, may be brought 

• 

against a young girl, who will then be defenseless. You see, 
monsieur, that my slender prospects are not the worst of my 
misfortunes. I have many reasons for humility. It is for 


THE MINOR ET PROPERTY. 


149 


your sake, and not for my own, that I lay before you these 
considerations, which often weigh but lightly on loving and 
devoted hearts. But you must take into consideration the 
fact that if I did not represent them to you, I might be 
suspected of wishing to induce your affection to overlook 
obstacles which the world, and, above all, your mother, would 
think insurmountable. In four months I shall be sixteen. 
You will perhaps acknowledge that we are, both of us, too 
young and too inexperienced to struggle with the penury of a 
life begun on no fortune but what I possess through the kind- 
ness of the late Monsieur de Jordy. Besides, my guardian 
wishes that I should not marry before the age of twenty. 
Who can tell what fate may have in store for you during these 
four years, the best of your life ? Do not spoil it for the sake 
of a poor girl. 

“Having thus explained to you, monsieur, the reasons 
given by my dear guardian, who, far from opposing my hap- 
piness, desires to contribute to it with all his power, and who 
hopes to see his protection — which will soon be but feeble — 
replaced by an affection equal to his own, it only remains for 
me to say how deeply I am touched by your offer and the 
warm compliments you have added to it. The prudence 
which dictates this answer is that of an old man who knows 
life well ; but the gratitude I must express is that of a young 
girl whose soul no other emotion has as yet entered. 

“I can therefore in all truth sign myself your faithful 
servant, Ursule Mirouet.” 

Savinien did not reply. Was he trying to influence his 
mother? Had her letter extinguished his love? A thousand 
such questions, all unanswerable, tortured Ursule, and by re- 
flex action the doctor, too, for he suffered under the slightest 
agitation that disturbed his dear child. Ursule often went up 
to her room and looked across at Savinien, whom she could 
see seated at his table, deep in thought, and often turning to 


150 


URSULE MIROUET. 


glance at her windows. It was not till the end of the week 
that she received this letter from Savinien whose delay was 
explained by an increase of his love : 

“To Mademoiselle Ursule Mirouet. 

“Dear Ursule: — There is something of the Breton in 
me, and when once I have made up my mind, nothing can make 
me alter it. Your guardian — whom may God long preserve ! 
— is perfectly right. But am I to blame, then, for loving 
you ? And all I ask is to know whether you love me. Tell 
me, if only by a sign, and then these four years will indeed 
be the best of my life ! 

“A friend of mine has conveyed to my uncle, Admiral de 
Kergarouet, a letter, in which I asked his influence to get me 
into the navy. The kind old man, touched by my mishaps, 
has answered that the King’s nomination would be contrary 
to rule if I wished to take rank. However, after three months 
of study at Toulon, the minister can place me in a ship as 
foreman of the steerage ; then, after a cruise against Algiers, 
with whom we are at war, I can pass an examination and 
become a naval cadet. If I should distinguish myself in the 
expedition to be sent against Algiers, I should certainly be 
made sub-lieutenant ; but how soon ? No one can tell. But, 
at any rate, the regulations will be made as elastic as possible 
to reinstate the name of Portendu£re on the navy-list. 

“ I can win you only through your guardian, I see, and 
your respect for him makes you the dearer to my heart. So, 
before replying, I will seek an interview with him ; on his 
answer my whole future must depend. Come what may, 
believe me that, rich or poor, the daughter of a bandmaster 
or of a king, you are to me her whom the voice of my heart 
has chosen. 

“ Dear Ursule, we live at a time when prejudice, which of 
old would have parted us, has no longer power enough to 
hinder our marriage. All the feelings of my heart are yours, 


THE MI NO RET PROPERTY. 


151 


and to your uncle I will give such guarantees as may assure 
him of your happiness. He does not know that I have loved 
you more in a few minutes than he has loved you in fifteen 
years ! Till this evening.” 

“ See here, godfather ! ” said Ursule, holding out the letter 
with an impulse of pride. 

“ Ah ! my child,” cried the doctor, after reading the letter, 
“ I am more glad than you are. By this determination the 
Vicomte has made up for all his misdeeds.” 

After dinner, Savinien called upon the doctor, who was 
just then walking with Ursule by the balustrade of the river- 
terrace. The Vicomte had received his clothes from Paris, 
and the lover had not omitted to enhance his personal advan- 
tages by dressing as carefully, as elegantly, as though it were 
to charm the handsome and haughty Comtesse de Kergarouct. 
On seeing him advance from the outside steps, the poor 
child clung to her uncle’s arm exactly as if she were trying to 
save herself from falling into an abyss, and the doctor heard 
the deep, hollow throbbing of her heart ; it made him 
shudder. 

“Leave us, my child,” he said to his ward, who went to 
sit down on the steps of the pavilion after suffering Savinien 
to take her hand and kiss it respectfully. 

“ Monsieur, will you give that dear creature to a ship’s 
captain?” said the young Vicomte to the doctor in a low 
voice. 

“ No,” said Minoret with a smile, “ we might have too long 
to wait; but — to a ship’s lieutenant.” 

Tears of joy stood in the young man’s eyes, and he grasped 
the old man’s hand very warmly. 

“ Then I shall go,” he said, “ to study, and try to learn in 
six months what the pupils of the naval college learn in six 
years.” 

“Go?” cried Ursule, flying towards them from the steps. 


152 


URSULE MIROUET. 


“ Yes, mademoiselle, to deserve you. So, the more haste 
I put into it, the more affection I shall show for you.” 

“To-day is the 3d of October,” said she, looking at him 
with infinite tenderness. “ Start after the 19th.” 

“Yes,” said the old man; “we will keep the feast of 
Saint-Savinien.” 

“ Then, good-by,” exclaimed the youth. “I must spend 
this week in Paris to take the preliminary steps, make my 
preparations, and buy the books and the mathematical instru- 
ments I need ; to make my way, too, in the minister’s good 
graces, and win the most favorable conditions possible.” 

Ursule and her godfather went with Savinien to the gate. 
After seeing him go into his mother’s house, they saw him 
come out again, followed by Tiennette, carrying a little port- 
manteau. 

“Why, if you are rich, do you compel him to serve in the 
navy? ” said Ursule to the doctor. 

“I believe you will soon think it was I who contracted his 
debts !” said her uncle, smiling. “I do not compel him. 
But, my darling, a uniform and the cross of the Legion of 
Honor won in battle will wipe out many a smirch. In four 
years he may rise to command a ship, and that is all I ask 
of him.” 

“ But he may be killed,” she said, showing the doctor a 
white face. 

“ Lovers, like drunkards, have a Providence of their own,” 
replied the doctor lightly. 

The poor child, unknown to her godfather, cut off at night 
enough of her beautiful long fair hair to make a chain ; then, 
two days later, she persuaded her music-master, old Schmucke, 
to promise that he would see that the hair was not changed, 
and that the chain should be finished for the following: 
Sunday. 

On Savinien’s return, he informed the doctor and his ward 
that he had signed his papers ; he was to be at Brest by the 


THE MI NO RET PROPERTY. 


153 


25th. As the doctor invited him to dinner on the 18th, he 
spent almost the whole of two days at his house ; and, in spite 
of the most prudent warnings, the lovers could not hinder 
themselves from betraying their mutual understanding to the 
cur£, the justice, the town doctor, and La Bougival. 

“ Children/ * said the old man, “ you are risking your 
happiness by not keeping your secret to yourselves.” 

At last, on the fete day, after mass, during which they had 
exchanged glances, Savinien, watched for by Ursule, crossed 
the street and came into the little garden, where they found 
themselves almost alone. To indulge them, the good man sat 
reading his paper in the Chinese pavilion. 

“ Dear Ursule,” said Savinien, “ will you give me a greater 
boon than my mother could if she were to give me life a 
second time ? ” 

“ I know what you would ask me,” said Ursule, interrupt- 
ing him. “ Here, this is my answer,” she added, as she took 
out of the pocket of her apron the chain made of her hair, 
and gave it him with a nervous trembling that betrayed her 
excessive joy. “ Wear this for my sake,” she said. “May 
my gift avert from you every peril by reminding you that my 
life is one with yours ! ” 

“ Ah, the little rogue ! she is giving him a chain of her 
hair,” said the doctor to himself. “ How could she do it? 
Cut her beautiful fair hair ! Why, she would give him my 
blood ! ” 

“And will you think it very odious of me if I ask you, be- 
fore we part, to give me your formal promise that you will never 
have any husband but me? ” said Savinien, kissing the chain, 
and looking at Ursule, while he could not restrain one tear. 

“ If I have not told you so too plainly already — I who went 
to gaze at the walls of a prison when you were inside,” she 
answered with a deep blush, “I repeat it now, Savinien. I 
shall never love any one but you, and will never marry any 
one else.” 


154 


UR SUL E MIROUET. 


Seeing that Ursule was half-hidden among the creepers, the 
young man could not resist the pleasure of clasping her to his 
heart and kissing her forehead; but she gave a low scream 
and dropped on to the bench ; and when Savinien sat down 
by her, imploring her pardon, he saw the doctor standing in 
front of them. 

“My good fellow,” said he, “Ursule is a sensitive plant; 
a hard word might kill her. For her sake you should mod- 
erate the expression of your love. Ah ! if you had loved her 
for fifteen years, you would have taken her word,” he added, 
in revenge for the last words of Savinien’s letter. 

Two days later Savinien left. In spite of the letters he 
wrote regularly to Ursule, she was a victim to a malady that 
had no evident cause. Like a fine fruit attacked by a maggot, 
one thought was eating her heart out. She lost her appetite 
and her bright color. When her godfather first asked her how 
she was feeling — 

“ I want to see the sea,” she said. 

“ It is difficult to take you to a seaport in the month of 
December?” said the old man. 

“Then shall I go?” said she. 

If the wind was high, Ursule was in agonies, believing, in 
spite of the learned observations of her godfather, the cure, 
and the justice, that Savinien was warring with a hurricane. 
The justice made her happy for a few days with a print repre- 
senting a naval cadet in his uniform. She read the news- 
papers, believing that they would give her news of the cruise 
in which Savinien was engaged. She devoured the seafaring 
novels of Cooper, and learned the meaning of sea words. 
These proofs of a fixed idea, so often affected by other women, 
were so perfectly natural in Ursule that she foresaw in a dream 
every letter from Savinien, and never failed to predict their 
arrival by relating the premonitory dream. 

u Now,” said she to the doctor, on the fourth occasion 


THE MINORET PROPERTY. 


155 


when this had happened without the doctor and the cure 
being at all surprised; “now, lam easy; however far away 
Savinien may be, if he were wounded, I should feel it at the 
same moment.” 

The old physician sat plunged in deep meditation, which, 
to judge from the expression of his face, the justice and the 
cure thought must be sorrowful. 

“What is wrong?” they asked him, when Ursule had left 
them together. 

“Will she live?” replied the old doctor. “Can so frail 
and tender a flower withstand the anguish of her heart?” 

Meanwhile the “little dreamer,” as the cure called her, 
worked indefatigably ; she understood the importance to a 
woman of the world of extensive information ; and when she 
was not studying singing, harmony, or composition, she spent 
her time in reading the books chosen for her in her godfather’s 
extensive library. 

While leading this busy life she suffered much, but she did 
not complain. Sometimes she would sit for hours gazing at 
Savinien’s window opposite. On Sunday, as she came from 
church, she followed Madame de Portenduere, watching her 
tenderly, for in spite of her sternness she loved her as being 
Savinien’s mother. Her piety was doubled ; she went to mass 
every morning, for she firmly believed that her dreams were a 
special grace from God. 

Alarmed by the ravages of this nostalgia of love, on 
Ursule’s birthday her godfather promised to take her to 
Toulon to see the departure of the fleet for Algiers without 
announcing their purpose to Savinien, who was sailing with it. 
The justice and the cure kept the secret of the doctor’s inten- 
tions with regard to this journey, which seemed to be under- 
taken for the benefit of Ursule’s health, and which puzzled 
the heirs very greatly. 

After having seen Savinien once more in his uniform, and 
after going on board the fine flagship of the admiral, to whom 


156 


URSULE MIROUET. 


the minister had especially recommended young Portendudre, 
Ursule, at her friend’s desire, went to inhale the soft air of 
Nice, and traveled along the Mediterranean coast as far as 
Genoa, where she had news of the arrival of the fleet before 
Algiers and a good report of the landing. The doctor would 
gladly have continued the journey across Italy, as much to 
divert Ursule’s mind as to complete her education and enlarge 
her ideas by comparing manners and scenery, and by the 
delights of a land where the greatest works of art are to be 
seen, and where so many civilizations have left glorious traces ; 
but the news of the opposition to the throne shown by the 
electors of the famous Chamber of 1830 called him back to 
France, whither he brought his ward home in a blooming state 
of health, and happy in the possession of a small model of 
the ship on which Savinien was serving. 

The elections of 1830 gave cohesion to the Minoret heirs; 
for, by the advice of Goupil and of Desire Minoret, they 
formed a committee at Nemours, by whose efforts the Liberal 
candidate was returned for Fontainebleau. Massin exerted 
immense influence over the country voters. Five of the post- 
master’s farmers also had votes. Dionis represented more than 
eleven votes. By meeting at the notary’s, Cremiere, Massin, 
the postmaster, and their adherents got into a habit of assem- 
bling there. On the doctor’s return, Dionis’ room had thus 
become their camping ground. 

The justice and the mayor, who then combined to resist 
the Liberals of Nemours, were beaten by the Opposition in 
spite of the efforts of the gentry in the neighborhood, and 
their defeat bound them very closely together. When Bon- 
grand and the Abb6 Chaperon told the doctor of the result of 
this antagonism, which had divided Nemours, for the first time, 
into two parties, and had given importance to his next-of-kin, 
Charles X. was actually leaving Rambouillet for Cherbourg. 
Desire Minoret, whose opinions were those of the Paris bar, 
had invited fifteen of his friends, with Goupil at their head, 


THE MI NO RET PROPERTY. 


157 


to come from Nemours ; the postmaster gave them horses to 
hurry to Paris, where they joined Desire on the night of the 
28th of July. Desire and Goupil led this little troop to 
assist in the seizure of the Hotel de Ville (Town Hall). 

Desire Minoret received the ribbon of the Legion of Honor, 
and was appointed deputy to the public prosecutor at Fon- 
tainebleau. Goupil won the cross of July. Dionis was 
elected mayor of Nemours, in the place of the Sieur Levrault, 
and the town council was then composed of Minoret-Levrault, 
deputy-mayor, of Massin, Cremiere, and all the followers of 
Dionis. 

Bongrand only kept his appointment as justice by the influ- 
ence of his son, who was made public prosecutor at Melun, 
his marriage with Mademoiselle Levrault seeming at that time 
probable. 

When three per cents, were down to forty-five, the doctor 
set out by post to Paris, and invested five hundred and forty 
thousand francs in certificates to the bearer. The rest of his 
fortune, amounting to about two hundred and seventy thousand 
francs, placed likewise in the funds, yielded nominally fifteen 
thousand francs a year. He invested in the same way the 
money left to Ursule by the old professor, as well as the 
eight thousand francs of nine years’ accumulated interest, 
which, with the help of a small addition on his part to 
make it up to a round sum, brought in fourteen hundred 
francs a year to his ward. In obedience to her master’s 
advice, La Bougival also would get three hundred and fifty 
francs a year by investing in the same way her five thousand 
and odd francs of savings. These prudent steps, as planned 
by the doctor and his friend Bongrand, were taken in perfect 
secrecy under favor of the political excitement. When calm 
was more or less restored, the doctor purchased a little house 
adjoining his own, and pulled it down, as well as the wall of 
his courtyard, to construct on the ground a coach-house and 
stables. That he should spend capital bearing a thousand 


158 


URSULE MIROUET. 


francs interest seemed to all the Minoret heirs pure insanity. 
This supposed craziness was the beginning of a new era in the 
doctor’s life; at a moment when horses and carriages were 
being almost given away, he brought from Paris three fine 
horses and a chariot. 

The first time the old man came to mass in a carriage, on 
a rainy day at the beginning of November, 1830, and got out 
to give his hand to Ursule, all the townsfolk rushed to the 
square, as much to see the doctor’s carriage and cross-question 
the coachman, as to comment on his ward, to whose excessive 
ambition Massin, Cremiere, and the postmaster ascribed their 
uncle’s follies. 

“ A chariot ! heh, Massin ? ” cried Goupil. “ Your inherit- 
ance promises well, hein ! ” 

“You asked good wages, I suppose, Cabirolle?” said the 
postmaster to the son of one of his guards, who took charge 
of the horses, “ for it is to be hoped that you will not see many 
horseshoes worn through in the service of a man of eighty. 
How much did those horses cost ? ” 

“ Four thousand francs. The chariot, though second-hand, 
cost him two thousand ; but it is a good one. The wheels 
have the patent axle-box.” 

“What do you call it, Cabirolle?” asked Madame Cre- 
miere. 

“ He says they have latent axle-hocks,” replied Goupil. 
“ It is an English notion ; they invented those wheels. Look 
how neat it is ; all covered up, nothing to be seen, nothing 
to catch, no ugly square iron peg projecting beyond the axle.” 

“What does axer-hock mean, then?” asked Madame Cre- 
miere very innocently. 

“Surely,” said Goupil, “you need hardly axe that.” 

“Ah ! I understand,” said she. 

“No, no; you are a good soul,” said Goupil. “It is a 
shame to take you in. The real word is patent axe-locks,, 
because you must axe how it is fastened.” 


THE MIN ORE T PROPERTY. 


159 


“ That’s it, madame,” said Cabirolle, who was himself 
taken in by Goupil’s explanation, the clerk spoke with such 
gravity. 

“It is a handsome carriage, at any rate,” said Cremiere, 
“ and he must be rich to set up in such style.” 

“She is going ahead, that little girl ! ” remarked Goupil. 
“But she is right; she is showing you howto enjoy life. 
Why have you not hue horses and chariots — you, Father 
Minoret? Will you submit to be humiliated ? In your place 
I would have a coach like a prince’s.” 

“I say, Cabirolle,” said Massin, “is it the little girl who 
puts my uncle up to all this luxury ? ” 

“I don’t know,” replied Cabirolle, “but she is, so to 
speak, mistress of the whole place. And now master after 
master comes from Paris. She is to learn to paint, they say.” 

“I will take the opportunity of having my likeness done,” 
said Madame Cremiere. Country folks still speak of having 
a likeness done instead of a portrait taken. 

“But the old German is not dismissed,” said Madame 
Massin. 

“No, he is here to-day,” replied Cabirolle. 

“ There is safety in numbers,” observed Madame Cremiere, 
making everybody laugh. 

“You need no longer count on the inheritance,” cried 
Goupil. “ Ursule is nearly seventeen; she is prettier than 
ever; traveling forms the youthful mind, and she knows the 
length of your uncle’s foot. The coach brings her five or 
six parcels a week, and dressmakers and milliners are always 
coming to try her gowns and things. My mistress is furious, 
I can tell you. Just wait till Ursule comes out, and look at 
her little neckerchief — a real India square, that must have 
cost six hundred francs.” 

If a thunderbolt had fallen in their midst, it could not 
have produced a greater effect on the group of inheritors than 
this speech from Goupil, who rubbed his hands. 


160 


URSULE MI ROUE T. 

The doctor’s old green drawing-room was redecorated by 
an upholsterer from Paris. Judged by the prodigality of his 
outlay, the doctor was accused first of having concealed the 
amount of his fortune and of having sixty thousand francs a 
year, and then of spending his capital to humor Ursule. He 
was regarded alternately as a millionaire and a spendthrift. 
“ He is an old fool ! ” summed up the opinion of the neigh- 
bors. The misguided verdict of the little town had this ad- 
vantage : it deceived the next-of-kin, who never suspected 
Savinien’s love for Ursule, which was the real cause of the 
doctor’s expenditure, for he was enchanted to accustom his 
goddaughter to play her part as a vicomtesse ; and having an 
income now of fifty thousand francs, he indulged himself in 
the pleasure of beautifying his idol. 

In the month of February, 1832, on the day when Ursule 
was seventeen, as she rose in the morning she saw Savinien at 
his window in his sub-lieutenant’s uniform. 

“ How is it that I knew nothing about it? ” she asked her- 
self. 

After the taking of Algiers, where Savinien had distin- 
guished himself by a deed of valor that had won him the 
cross, the corvette on which he sailed having remained at sea 
for many months, he had been quite unable to send a letter 
to the doctor, and he did not choose to retire from the service 
without consulting him. The new government, wishing to 
keep so illustrious a name on the navy-list, had taken advan- 
tage of the general scramble of July to promote Savinien. 
Having obtained a fortnight’s leave, the young lieutenant had 
come by mail from Toulon in time for Ursule’s birthday, and 
to ask the doctor’s advice at the same time. 

“ He is come ! ” cried the girl, rushing into her godfather’s 
room. 

“That is well,” he replied. “I can guess his reason for 
quitting the service; he can now remain at Nemours.” 


THE MI NO RET PROPERTY. 


161 


“This is my birthday treat ! It is all in those words!” 
she exclaimed, throwing her arms arouud the doctor’s neck 
and kissing him. 

In reply to a signal she made him, Savinien came across at 
once. She wanted to admire him ; he seemed to her changed 
for the better. In fact, military discipline gives to a man’s 
gestures, gait, and demeanor a mixture of gravity and decis- 
ion, a certain rectitude, which enables the most superficial 
observer to recognize a soldier under a civilian’s coat ; noth- 
ing can more clearly prove that man is made to command. 
Ursule loved Savinien all the more for it, and felt a child’s 
delight in walking arm in arm with him in the little garden, 
while she made him tell her the part he had played “ in his 
capacity of naval cadet” in the siege of Algiers. Evidently 
it was Savinien who had taken Algiers. She saw everything 
red, she declared, when she looked at Savinien’s decoration. 
The doctor, who, while dressing in his room, watched the pair, 
presently joined them. Then, without telling the Vicomte 
everything, he explained to him that in the event of Madame 
de Portenduere’s consenting to his marriage with Ursule, his 
goddaughter’s fortune was such as to make his pay superfluous 
in any rank he might be promoted to. 

“ Alas ! ” said Savinien, “ it will take a long time to over- 
come my mother’s opposition. Before I left, when she had 
the alternative of keeping me near her if she would agree to 
my marrying Ursule, or of seeing me only at long intervals, 
and knowing that I was exposed to the risk of my profession, 
she let me go ” 

“But, Savinien, we shall be together,” said Ursule, taking 
his hand and shaking it with a kind of irritation. 

That they should see each other and never part was to her 
the sum-total of love ; she saw nothing beyond ; and her 
pretty impatience and the petulance of her tone expressed 
such perfect innocence that the doctor and Savinien were 

touched. 

11 


162 


URSULE MIR O UET. 

Savinien, after his consultation with the doctor, sent in his 
letter of resignation, and Ursule’s birthday was crowned with 
joy by her lover’s presence. 

A few months later, by the beginning of May, Doctor 
Minoret’s home life had settled into calm regularity again, 
but with another constant visitor. The young Vicomte’s 
assiduity was at once interpreted as that of a future bride- 
groom ; all the more so since, whether at mass or out walk- 
ing, his manner and Ursule’s plainly betrayed the mutual 
understanding of their hearts. Dionis remarked to the heirs 
that the old man never claimed interest from Madame de 
Portenduere, who already owed it for three years. 

“ She will be forced to give in, to consent to her son’s mar- 
rying beneath him,” said the notary. “ If such a misfortune 
should happen, it is probable that the larger part of your 
uncle's fortune will prove, as Basile says, an irresistible argu- 
ment.” 

When the expectant heirs understood that the old man’s 
preference for Ursule was too great for him not to secure her 
happiness at their expense, their wrath became as cunning as 
it was deep. Every evening since the revolution of July had 
seen them meet at Dionis’ house, and there they cursed the 
lovers; and the evening hardly ever ended without their hav- 
ing tried in vain to hit on some way of thwarting the old 
man. Zelie, who had, no doubt, like the doctor, taken 
advantage of the fall in the funds to invest her enormous sav- 
ings, was the most furious against the orphan and the Porten- 
du^res. One evening, when Goupil — who, however, as a 
rule, took care not to spend his 'evenings too dully — had 
come in to pick up some information as to the affairs of the 
town, which were under discussion, Zelie had a recrudescence 
of hatred. She had that morning seen the doctor, with 
Ursule and Savinien, returning from a drive in the neighbor- 
hood, with an appearance of intimacy that told all. 

“ I would give thirty thousand francs, gladly, if only God 


THE MINOR ET PROPERTY. 


163 


would take our uncle to Himself before that Portendu£re and 
that little minx could be married/' said she. 

Goupil walked home with Monsieur and Madame Minoret; 
and when they were in the middle of their vast courtyard, he 
said, looking suspiciously about him to make sure that they 
were alone : 

“ Will you give me money enough to buy Dionis out of his 
business, if I will see that the marriage of Monsieur de Por- 
tenduere is broken off? ” 

“ How? ” asked the colossus. 

“Do you think I 'am fool enough to tell you my plan?” 
replied the clerk. 

“ Well, my boy, make them quarrel, and we will see,” said 
Zelie. 

“ I am not going to plunge into such a job on the strength 
of ‘ we will see.’ The young gentleman is hot-headed, and 
might kill me ; and I must be well rough-shod, and his match 
with the rapier and pistol. Set me up in life, and I will keep 
my word.” 

“Stop the marriage, and I will set you up,” retorted the 
postmaster. 

“ For nine months now you have been debating whether 
you will lend me a wretched fifteen thousand francs to buy 
Lecoeur's business — the usher’s — and you expect me to take 
your word ? Get along ! You will lose your uncle’s fortune ; 
and serve you right ! ” 

“ If it were only a matter of fifteen thousand francs and 
Lecoeur’s business, I should not say no,” replied Zelie; “but 
to be security for fifty thousand crowns ! ” 

“But I will repay you,” said Goupil, with a fascinating 
leer at Zelie, which the postmistress met with an imperious 
stare. 

It was like vitriol on steel. 

“ We will wait,” said Zelie. 

“ Possessed by the genius of evil ! ” thought Goupil. “If 


164 


URSULE MIROUET. 


ever I get hold of these two,” said he to himself as he went 
away, “ I will squeeze them like lemons ! ” 

Savinien, while cultivating the society of the doctor, the 
justice, and the cure, showed them the excellence of his char- 
acter. The young man’s love for Ursule, so absolutely dis- 
interested, so constant, appealed so strongly to the three 
friends that they no longer separated the two young people in 
their thoughts. Before long the monotony of this patriarchal 
life, and the confidence the lovers felt in their future, had 
given their affection a fraternal aspect. The doctor often left 
Savinien and Ursule together. He had rightly estimated the 
admirable young man who kissed Ursule’s hand when he 
entered, and would never have asked such a privilege when 
alone with her, so deep was his respect for the innocence and 
candor of the child ; and the extreme sensitiveness which she 
had often betrayed had taught him that a harsh word, a cold 
look, or alternations of gentleness and roughness might kill 
her. The utmost boldness of the lovers always showed itself 
in the presence of the old men in the evening. 

Two years, full of secret delight, thus slipped away, un 
broken by any event but the useless efforts of the young man 
to obtain his mother’s consent to his marriage with Ursule. 
He would sometimes talk for the whole morning, his mother 
listening to his entreaties and arguments, but making no reply 
but by the obstinate silence of a Bretonne or by curt refusals. 

At nineteen, Ursule, elegant, well educated, and an excel- 
lent musician, had nothing more to learn ; she was perfection. 
And she had a reputation for beauty, grace, and information 
which reached far and wide. One day the doctor had to 
refuse the proposals of the Marquise d’Aiglemont, who would 
have married her to her eldest son. Six months later, in spite 
of the absolute silence preserved by Ursule, by her guardian, 
and by Madame d’Aiglemont, Savinien heard by chance of 
this affair. Touched by such delicate conduct, he spoke of it 


THE MIN 0 RET PROPERTY. 


165 


as an argument to overcome his mother’s aversion, but she 
would only say — 

“ If the d’Aiglemonts choose to marry beneath them, is 
that any reason why we should?” 

In the month of December, 1834, the worthy and pious 
old man was visibly breaking. As they saw him come out of 
church, his face pinched and yellow, his eyes dim, all the 
town began to speak of his approaching end, for the good 
man was now eighty-eight years of age. 

“ Now you will know where you stand,” they said to the 
heirs. 

The doctor’s death had, in fact, the fascination of a prob- 
lem. But the old man did not think that he was ill ; he had 
illusions on the subject, and neither poor Ursule, nor Savinien, 
nor Monsieur Bongrand, nor the cure, could, in decency, 
explain his danger to him ; the town doctor of Nemours, who 
came to see him every evening, dared prescribe nothing more. 
Old Minoret felt no pain ; he was gently burning out. In 
him the intellect remained clear, strong, and exact. In old 
men of this stamp the soul is potent over the body, and gives 
it strength to die standing. To postpone the fatal hour, the 
cure granted his parishioner a dispensation from attending 
mass at church, and allowed him to read prayers at home, for 
the doctor carefully fulfilled all his religious duties ; the nearer 
he was to the grave, the more he loved God. 

At the New Year, Ursule persuaded him to sell his carriage 
and horses, and dismiss Cabirolle. The justice, whose un- 
easiness as to Ursule’s prospects was far from being lulled by 
the old man’s half-confidences, touched on the delicate 
question of his fortune, explaining to him one evening the 
necessity for making Ursule independent by law, by declaring 
her to be of age. She would then be competent to receive 
an account of his guardianship and possess property; this 
would enable him to leave her money. In spite of this 


166 


URSULE MIROUET. 


opening, the old man, though he had formerly consulted the 
justice, did not confide to him what his purpose was with 
regard to Ursule ; however, he formally declared her of age. 
The more eager the lawyer showed himself to know what 
steps his old friend had taken to provide for Ursule, the 
more suspicious the doctor became. In short, Minoret was 
actually afraid to confide to the justice the secret of the 
thirty-six thousand francs in bonds payable to the bearer 
on demand. 

“Why,” said Bongrand, “set chance against you?” 

“Of two chances,” replied the doctor, “ one must avoid 
die most risky.” 

Bongrand carried through the matter of the “ emancipa- 
tion ” so briskly that Mademoiselle Mirouet was legally 
independent on the day when she was twenty. This anni- 
versary was destined to be the last festival kept by the old 
doctor, who, feeling no doubt some presentiment of his 
approaching end, celebrated the occasion magnificently by 
giving a little ball, to which he invited the young people 
of the four families of Dionis, Cremiere, Minoret, and Mas- 
sin. Savinien, Bongrand, the cure and his two assistant 
priests, the town doctor, Mesdames Zelie Minoret, Massin, 
and Cremiere, with old Schmucke, were his guests at a grand 
dinner before the dance. 

“ I feel that I have not long to stay,” said the old man to the 
notary towards the end of the evening. “ I beg you to come 
to-morrow to draw up the report and accounts I have to hand 
over to Ursule as her guardian, so as to avoid all complica- 
tions after my death. Thank God, I have not robbed my 
heirs of a sou, and have spent nothing but my income. 
Messieurs Crdmiere, Massin, and my nephew Minoret are 
the family trustees appointed for Ursule, and they must be 
present at the auditing of the account.” 

These words, overheard by Massin, and repeated in the 
ballroom, filled the three families with joy, after they had 


THE MI NO RET PROPERTY. 


167 


spent three years in constant alternations of feeling, believing 
themselves sometimes rich and sometimes disinherited. 

‘‘It is a lamp flying out,” said Madame Cremiere. (She 
meant dying out.) 

When, at about two in the morning, no one remained in 
the room but Savinien, Bongrand, and the Abbe Chaperon, 
the old doctor said, as he pointed to Ursule, lovely in her 
ball-dress, having just said good-night to the young Cremiere 
and Massin girls — 

“ I place her in your hands, my friends. In a few days I 
shall no longer be here to protect her ; stand between her 
and the world until she is married — I am afraid for her ” 

These words made a painful impression. The account 
drawn up and read a few days later in the presence of a family 
council proved that Doctor Minoret was indebted to Ursule 
in the sum of ten thousand six hundred francs, partly as 
arrears of the shares bearing interest to the amount of 
fourteen thousand francs, which was accounted for by the 
investment of Captain de Jordy’s legacy, and partly as a 
small capital of five thousand francs derived from certain 
gifts made to his ward during the last fifteen years, on their 
respective birthdays or namedays. 

This authenticated schedule of the account had been ad- 
vised by the justice, who feared what might be the result of 
the old man’s death ; and, unhappily, not without reason. 
The day after the account was passed which made Ursule the 
mistress of ten thousand six hundred francs in shares and of 
fourteen hundred francs a year, the doctor had an attack of 
weakness which compelled him to keep his bed. 

It spite of the caution which shrouded the house, a rumor 
spread in the town that he was dead, and the heirs flew about 
the streets like the beads of a rosary of which the thread is 
snapped. Massin, who came to inquire, heard from Ursule 
herself that the old man was in bed. Unfortunately, the 
town doctor had prognosticated that when Minoret took to 


168 


URSULE MIROUET. 


his bed he would die at once. From that moment the whole 
family stood posted in the street, in the square, or on their 
front doorsteps, in spite of the cold, absorbed in discussing 
the long-expected event, and waiting for the moment when 
the cure should carry to the old man the last sacraments with 
all the ceremony usual in provincial towns. Hence, when 
two days later the Abbe Chaperon crossed the High Street, 
accompanied by his curate and the choir boys, the inheritors 
followed him to take possession of the house and prevent any- 
thing being removed, and to clutch with greedy hands all the 
imaginary treasure. When the doctor saw, beyond the clerics, 
all his heirs on their knees, and, far from praying, watching 
him with gleaming eyes as bright as the twinkling tapers, he 
could not repress a mischievous smile. The cure looked 
round, saw them, and read the prayers very slowly. The 
postmaster was the first to rise from his uncomfortable atti- 
tude, his wife followed his example; Massin, fearful lest Zelie 
and her husband should lay a hand on some little possession, 
went after them to the drawing-room, and there, a few minutes 
later, all the party had assembled. 

“ He is too honest a man to steal extreme unction,” said 
Cremiere ; “so we may be easy.” 

“Yes; we shall each have about twenty thousand francs a 
year,” replied Madame Massin. 

“I have gotten it into my head,” said Zelie, “that for 
the last three years he has not been investing ; he liked to 
hoard the money ” 

“The treasure is in his cellar no doubt? ” said Massin to 
Cremiere. 

“ If we are so lucky as to find anything at all ! ” observed 
Minoret-Levrault. 

“ But after what he said at the ball,” cried Madame Massin, 
“ there can be no doubt.” 

“ Whatever there may be,” said Cremiere, “how shall we 
proceed? Shall we divide? Or put it into the lawyer’s 


THE MIN O RET PROPERTY. 


169 


hands? Or distribute it in lots? For, after all, we are all 
of age.” 

A discussion, which soon became acrid, arose as to the 
method of procedure. At the end of half an hour a noise of 
loud voices, above them all Zelie’s shrill tones, rang across 
the courtyard out into the street. 

“ He must be dead,” said the curious crowd that had col- 
lected there. 

The uproar reached the doctor’s ears, who could hear these 
words — 

“ But there is the house ; the house is worth thirty thousand 
francs ! ” shouted, or rather bellowed, by Cremiere. 

“ Very well, we will pay for it as much as it is worth,” re- 
torted Zelie sharply. 

“ Monsieur le Cur£,” said the old man to the abbd, who 
had remained with his friend after the sacrament, “ let me die 
in peace. My heirs, like those of Cardinal Ximenes, are 
capable of pillaging my house before I am dead, and I have 
no monkey to make restitution. Go and explain that I will 
have no one in the house.” 

The cure and the physician went downstairs and repeated 
the dying man’s orders, adding, in their indignation, some 
severe words of reproof. 

“Madame Bougival,” said the town-doctor, “shut the 
gate, and let no one in ; a man cannot even die quietly, it 
would seem. Make a cup of mustard, to apply plasters to 
Monsieur Minoret’s feet.” 

“Your uncle is not dead; he may live some time yet,” 
said the abbe to the family who had brought all their children. 
“ He desires perfect silence, and will have no one near him but 
his ward. What a difference between that young creature’s 
conduct and yours ! ” 

“Old hypocrite!” cried Cremiere. “ I will keep guard. 
It is quite possible that he may plot something against our 
interests.” 


170 


URSULE MIROUET. 


The postmaster had already disappeared into the garden, 
intending to watch over his uncle with Ursule, and to gain 
admission into the house as her assistant. He came back on 
tiptoe without his boots making a sound, for there were car- 
pets in the passages and on the stairs. He thus came close 
to his uncle’s door without being heard. The curd and the 
physician had left ; La Bougival was preparing the mustard 
plasters. 

“ Are we quite alone ? ” said the old man to his ward. 

Ursule stood on tiptoe to look out on the courtyard. 

“Yes,” said she, “Monsieur le Cure shut the gate as he 
went out.” 

“ My darling child,” said the dying man, “ my hours, my 
minutes are numbered. I have not been a doctor for nothing ; 
the mustard plasters recommended by the apothecary will not 
carry me through till to-night. Do not cry, Ursule,” he said, 
finding himself interrupted by his ward’s sobs, “ but listen to 
me: the point is that you should marry Savinien. As soon 
as La Bougival comes up with the sinapism, go down to the 
Chinese pavilion; here is the key; lift up the marble top 
of the Boule cabinet, and under it you will find a letter 
addressed to you ; take it, and come up and show it to me, 
for I shall not die easy unless I know that it is in your hands. 
When I am dead, do not at once announce the fact ; first 
send for Monsieur de Portenduere, read the letter together, 
and swear to me in his name and in your own that you will 
obey my last injunctions. When he has done what I desire, 
you can announce my death, and then the comedy of the 
inheritance will begin. God grant that those monsters may 
not ill-use you.” 

“Yes, godfather.” 

The postmaster did not wait for the end of the scene ; he 
took himself off on tiptoe, remembering that the locked door 
of the pavilion opened from the book-gallery. He himself 
had been present at the time of a discussion between the 


THE MIN O RET PROPERTY. 


171 


architect and the locksmith, who had insisted that if there 
were to be a way into the house through the window looking 
out on the river there must be a lock to the door leading 
into the book gallery, the pavilion being a sort of summer- 
house. 

Minoret, his eyes dim with greed and his blood singing in 
his ears, unscrewed the lock with a pocket-knife as dexter- 
ously as a thief. He went into the pavilion, took the packet 
of papers without stopping to open it, replaced the lock and 
restored order, and then went to sit in the dining-room, wait- 
ing till La Bougival should be gone upstairs with the mustard 
plaster, to steal out of the house. This he achieved with all 
the greater ease because Ursule thought it more necessary to 
see that the mustard was applied than to obey her godfather’s 
injunctions. 

“ The letter, the letter,” said the old man in a dying voice. 
“ Do as I bid you — there is the key. I must see the letter in 
your hands.” 

He spoke with such a wild look that La Bougival said to 
Ursule: “Do as your godfather tells you, at once, or you’ll 
be the death of him.” 

She kissed his forehead, took the key, and went down, but 
was immediately recalled by a piercing cry from La Bougival, 
and ran back. The old man glanced at her, saw that her 
hands were empty, sat up in bed, and tried to speak — and 
then died with a last fearful gasp, his eyes staring with terror. 

The poor child, seeing death for the first time, fell on her 
knees, and melted into tears. La Bougival closed the old 
man’s eyes and laid him straight. Then, when she had 
“dressed the corpse,” as she said, she went to call Monsieur 
Savinien ; but the heirs, who were prowling at the top of the 
street, surrounded by an inquisitive crowd, exactly like a flock 
of crows waiting till a horse is buried to come and scratch up 
the earth, and ferret with beak and claws, came running in 
with the swiftness of birds of prey. 


172 


URSULE MIROUET. 


The postmaster, meanwhile, had gone home to master the 
contents of the mysterious packet. This was what he read : 

“ To my dear Ursule Mirouet, daughter of my illegitimate 
brother-in-law, Joseph Mirouet, and of his wife, Dinah 
Grollman. 

“Nemours, January 15, 1830. 

“My little Angel: — My fatherly affection, which you 
have so fully justified, is based not merely on the promise I 
swore to your poor father to fill his place, but also on your like- 
ness to Ursule Mirouet, my late wife, of whom you constantly 
remind me by your grace and nature, your artlessness and 
charm. 

“Your being the child of my father-in-law’s natural son 
might lead to any will in your favor being disputed ” 

“ The old rascal ! ” exclaimed the postmaster. 

“My adopting you would have given rise to a lawsuit. 
Again, I have always been averse to the notion of marrying 
you myself to leave you my fortune, for I might have lived to 
a great age and spoilt your future happiness, which is delayed 
only by the life of Madame de Portenduere. Having regard 
to the difficulties, and wishing to leave you a fortune adequate 
to a handsome position ” 

“ The old wretch, he thought of everything ! ” 

“ Without doing any injury to my heirs ” 

“ Miserable Jesuit ! As if we had not a right to his whole 
fortune ! ” 

“ I have put aside for you the sum-total of my savings for 
the last eighteen years, which I have regularly invested by my 
lawyer’s assistance, in the hope of leaving you as happy as 
money can make you. Without wealth your education and 
superior ideas would be a misfortune \ besides, you ought to 
bring a good dowry to the excellent young man who loves 
you. So look in the middle of the third volume of the 


THE MIN 0 RET PROPERTY. 


173 


( Pandects,’ in folio, bound in red morocco, the last volume 
on the lower shelf above the library cupboard, in the third 
division on the drawing-room side, and you will find three cer- 
tificates to bearer of three per cent, consols, each for 12,000 
francs.” 

“ What a depth of villainy ! ” cried the postmaster. “ Ah, 
God will not permit me to be thus thwarted ! ” 

“Take them at once, with the small savings left at the 
moment of my death, which are in the next volume. Re- 
member, my darling child, that you are bound to obey blindly 
the wish that has been the joy of my whole life, and which 
will compel me to appeal for help to God if you should dis- 
obey me. But to guard against any scruple of your dear 
conscience, which is, I know, ingenious in tormenting you, 
you will find with this a will in due form, bequeathing these 
certificates to Monsieur Savinien de Portenduere ; so, whether 
you own them, or they are the gift of your lover, they will be 
legitimately yours. Your godfather 

“Denis Minoret.” 

Subjoined to this letter, on a sheet of stamped paper, was 
the following document : 

“ This is my Will. 

“I, Denis Minoret, Doctor of Medicine, resident at 
Nemours, sound in mind and body, as the date of this will 
proves, dedicate my soul to God, beseeching Him to forgive 
my long errors in favor of my sincere repentance. Then, 
having discerned in the Vicomte Savinien de Portenduere a 
sincere affection for me, I bequeath to him thirty-six thou- 
sand francs in perpetual consols at three per cent., to be paid 
out of my estate as a first charge. 

“Made and written all by my own hand at Nemours, Jan- 
uary 11, 1831. 


“ Denis Minoret.” 


174 


URSULE MIROUET. 


Without a moment’s hesitation the postmaster, who, to 
make sure of being alone, had locked himself into his wife’s 
room, looked about for the tinder-box; he had two warnings 
from heaven by the extinction of two matches which would 
not light. The third blazed up. He burnt the letter and 
the will on the hearth, and took the needless precaution of 
burying the ashes of the paper and wax in the cinders. Then, 
licking his lips at the idea of having thirty-six thousand francs 
unknown to his wife, he flew back to his uncle’s house, spurred 
by one idea — the single fixed idea that his dull brain could 
master. On seeing his uncle’s dwelling invaded by the three 
families, at last in possession of the stronghold, he quaked 
lest he' should be unable to carry out a project which he gave 
himself no time to think over, considering only the obstacles 
in the w 9ty. 

“What are you doing here?” he said to Massin and Cr6- 
miere. “ Do you suppose that we are going to leave the 
house and papers to be pillaged ? There are three of us ; we 
cannot encamp on the spot. You, Cr6miere, go at once to 
Dionis and tell him to come and certify the death. Though 
I am an official, I am not competent to draw up the death 
certificate of my own uncle. You, Massin, had better ask 
old Bongrand to seal up everything. You,” he added to his 
wife, Madame Massin, and Madame Cremi£re, “ you should 
sit with Ursule, ladies, and so nothing can be taken. Above 
all, lock the gate, so that no one can get out.” 

The women, who felt the weight of this advice, went at 
once to Ursule’s room, where they found the noble girl, 
already the object of such cruel suspicions, on her knees in 
prayer, her face bathed in tears. 

Minoret, guessing that they would not remain long with 
Ursule, and suspicious of his co-heirs’ want of trust in him, 
hastened to the library, saw the volume, which he opened, 
took out the three certificates, and found in the other thirty 
bank-notes. Notwithstanding his base nature, the big man 


THE MIN 0 RET PROPERTY. 


175 


fancied a whole chime was ringing in each ear, the blood 
hissed in his brain, as he achieved the theft. In spite of the 
cold weather, his shirt was wet with perspiration down his 
back ; and his legs shook to such a degree that he dropped 
into an armchair in the drawing-room as if he had been 
struck on the head with a sledge-hammer. 

“ Dear me, how glib the idea of a fortune has made old 
Minoret!” Massin had said, as they hurried through the 
town. “Did you notice it?” he observed to Cr&niere. 

‘ Come here, and go there 1 ’ How well he knows the game, 
and how to play it ! ” 

“Yes, for a fat-head he had a style ” 

“'I say,” said Massin in alarm, “his wife is with him. 
They are two too many. Do you run the errands ; I will go 
back again.” 

So just as the postmaster had seated himself, he saw the 
registrar’s hot face at the gate, for he had run back with the 
nimbleness of a ferret. 

“ Well, what is it ? ” asked the .postmaster, as he let in his 
co-heir. 

“ Nothing; I came back to witness the sealing,” replied 
Massin, glaring at him like a wildcat. 

“ I wish it were done, and that we could all go quietly 
home,” said Minoret. 

“And we will put some one in charge,” said the registrar. 
“ La Bougival is capable of anything in the interest of that 
little minx. We will put in Goupil.” 

“ Goupil ! ” cried Minoret; “he would find the hoard, 
and we should see nothing but smoke.” 

“Let us see,” replied Massin; “this evening they will 
watch by the dead. We shall have everything sealed up in an 
hour, so our wives will be on guard themselves. The funeral 
must be to-morrow at noon. The inventory cannot be made 
till after a week. ” 

“But,” said the colossus smiling, “we can turn out that 


176 


URSULE MIROUET. 


minx, and we will engage the mayor’s drummer to stop in the 
house and guard the property.” 

“ Very good,” said the registrar, “see to that yourself ; you 
are the head of the Minorets.” 

“ Now, ladies, ladies, be so good as to wait in the drawing- 
room. You cannot be off to dinner yet ; we must witness 
the affixing of the seals for our common interest.” 

He then took Zelie aside to impart to her Massin’s idea 
about Ursule. The women, whose hearts were full of vengeance, 
and who longed to turn the tables on “the little hussy,” 
hailed the idea of turning her out of the house with glee. 

When Bongrand arrived he was indignant at the request 
made to him, as a friend of the deceased, by Zelie and 
Madame Massin, to desire Ursule to leave the house. 

“ Go yourselves and turn her out of the home of her father, 
her godfather, her uncle, her benefactor, her guardian ! Go 
— you who owe your fortunes to her nobility of character — 
take her by the shoulders — thrust her into the street in the 
face of the whole town ! You think her capable of robbing 
you? Well, then, engage a guardian of the property; you 
have a perfect right to do so. But understand clearly that I 
will put seals on nothing in her room ; it is her own, all that 
is in it is her property ; I shall inform her what her rights are, 
and advise her to place everything there that belongs to her. 
— Oh ! in your presence! ” he added, hearing a murmur of 
disapproval. 

“What? ” cried the tax-receiver to the postmaster and the 
women, who were struck speechless at Bongrand’s angry 
address. 

“ A pretty magistrate ! ” said Minoret. 

Ursule, on a low chair, half-fainting, her head thrown back, 
her hair undone, was sobbing from time to time. Her eyes 
were heavy, their lids swollen ; in short, she was in a state of 
moral and physical prostration, which might have touched the 
heart of the fiercest creatures excepting heirs. 


THE MIN ORE T PROPERTY. 


m 


“Ah, Monsieur Bongrand, after my happy f^te, here are 
death and despair,” she said, with the unconscious poetry of 
a sweet nature. “You know what he was. In twenty years 
he never spoke an impatient word to me ! I thought he 
would live to a hundred ! He was a mother to me,” she 
cried, “and a kind mother! ” 

The utterance of her broken ideas brought on a torrent 
of tears, broken by sobs, and she fell back half-senseless. 

“ My child,” said the justice, hearing the inheritors on the 
stairs, “you have the rest of your life to weep in, and only a 
moment for business. Bring into your own room everything 
in the house that belongs to you. The heirs insist on my 
affixing seals ” 

“'Oh, his heirs may take everything ! ” cried Ursule, start- 
ing up in a spasm of fierce indignation. “ I have here all 
that is precious to me ! ” and she struck her bosom. 

“What? what?” asked the postmaster, who, with Massin, 
now showed his horrible face. 

“The memory of his virtues, of his life, of all his words, 
the image of his heavenly mind,” she replied, her eyes and 
cheeks flaming as she raised her hand with a proud gesture. 

“Ay, and you have a key there too,” cried Massin, going 
on all fours like a cat to seize a key which slipped out of the 
folds of her bodice as she lifted her arm. 

“ It is the key of his study,” she said, coloring. “ He was 
sending me there just when he died.” 

The two men exchanged a hideous smile, and turned to the 
justice with a look that expressed a blighting suspicion. 
Ursule saw and interpreted the look, malignant on Minoret’s 
part, involuntary on Massin’s, and drew herself up, as pale as 
if all her blood had ebbed ; her eyes glistened with the light- 
nings that can only flash at the cost of vitality, and in a 
choking voice she said — 

“ Ah, Monsieur Bongrand, all that is in this room is mine 
only by my godfather’s kindness; they may take it all; I have 
12 


178 


URSULE MIROUET 


nothing about me but my clothes ; I will go out of it and 
never come in again.” 

She went into her guardian’s room, and no entreaties could 
bring her forth — for the heirs were a little ashamed of their 
conduct. She desired La Bougival to engage two rooms at 
the Old Posting Inn till she should find some lodging in the 
town, where they might stay together. She went into her 
room only to fetch her prayer-book, and remained all night 
with the cure and another priest and Savinien, weeping and 
praying. Savinien came in after his mother had gone to bed, 
and knelt down without speaking by Ursule, who gave him 
the saddest smile, while thanking him for coming so faithfully 
to share in her sorrows. 

“ My child,” said Monsieur Bongrand, bringing in a large 
bundle, “ one of your uncle’s relations has taken out of your 
wardrobe all that you need, for the seals will not be removed 
for some days, and you will then have everything that belongs 
to you. In your own interest I have placed seals on your 
things too.” 

“Thank you,” she said, pressing his hand. “ Come and 
look at him once more. You would think he was sleeping. 

The old man’s face had at this moment the transient bloom 
of beauty which is seen on the face of those who have died 
without pain ; it seemed radiant. 

“ Did he not give you anything privately before he died ? ” 
asked the justice of Ursule in a whisper. 

“ Nothing,” she replied. “ He only said something about 
a letter ” 

“Good ! that will be found,” said Bongrand. “ Then it 
is lucky for you that they insisted on the seals.” 

At daybreak Ursule bade adieu to the house where her happy 
childhood had been spent, and above all to the room where 
her love had had its birth, and which was so dear to her that 
in the midst of her deep grief she had a tear of regret for 
this peaceful and happy nook. After gazing for the last time 


THE MIN O RET PROPERTY. 


179 


on her windows and on Savinien in turn, she went off to the 
inn, accompanied by La Bougival, who carried her bundle; 
by the justice, who gave her his arm ; and by Savinien, her 
kind protector. 

And so, in spite of every precaution, the suspicious lawyer 
was in the right ; Ursule would be bereft of fortune, and at 
war with the heirs-at-law. 

Next day the whole town followed Doctor Minoret’s funeral. 
When they heard of the conduct of the next-of-kin to Ursule, 
most people thought it natural and necessary ; there was an 
inheritance at stake ; the old man was miserly ; Ursule might 
fancy she had rights ; the heirs were only protecting their 
property ; and, after all, she had humiliated them enough in 
their uncle’s time — he had made them as welcome as a dog 
among ninepins. Desir6 Minoret, who was doing no great 
things in his office, said the neighbors who were envious of 
the postmaster, came for the funeral. Ursule, unable to 
attend, was in bed, ill of a nervous fever, brought on as much 
by the insults offered her as by her deep grief. 

“Just look at that hypocrite in tears,” said some of the 
faction, pointing to Savinien, who was in great sorrow for 
the doctor’s death. 

“ The question is whether he has any good cause for tears,” 
remarked Goupil. “Do not laugh too soon ; the seals have 
not yet been removed.” 

“Pooh!” said Minoret, who knew more than he did, 
“ you have always frightened us for nothing.” 

Just as the procession was starting for the church, Goupil 
had a bitter mortification ; he was about to take Desire’s arm, 
but the young man turned away, thus denying his comrade in 
the eyes of all Nemours. 

“It is of no use to be angry,” said the clerk to himself; 
“I should lose all chance of revenge,” and his dry heart 
swelled in his bosom like a sponge. 

Before breaking the seals and making the inventory, they 


180 


URSULE MIROUET. 


had to wait for the public prosecutor’s commission, as public 
guardian of all orphans, to be issued to Bongrand as his 
representative. Then the Minoret property, of which every 
one had talked for ten days, was released, and the inventory 
was made and witnessed with every formality of the law. 
Dionis made a job of it ; Goupil was glad to have a finger in 
any mischief ; and as the business was a paying one, they 
took their time over it. They generally breakfasted on the 
spot. The notary, the clerks, heirs, and witnesses drank the 
finest wines in the cellar. 

In a country town, where every one has his own house, it is 
rather difficult to find lodgings ; and when any business is for 
sale, the house commonly goes with it. The justice, who was 
charged by the court with the guardianship of the orphan 
girl, saw no way of housing her out of the inn but by buying 
for her, in the High Street, at the corner of the bridge over 
the Loing, a small house, with a door opening into a passage ; 
on the ground floor was a sitting-room with two windows on 
the street, and a kitchen behind it, with a glass door looking 
into a yard of about a hundred square feet. A narrow stair, 
with a borrowed light from the river-side, led to the first floor, 
containing three rooms, and to two attics above. 

Monsieur Bongrand borrowed two thousand francs of La 
Bougival’s savings to pay the first installment of the price of 
this house, which was six thousand francs, and he obtained a 
delay for the remainder. To make room for the books which 
Ursule wished to buy back, Bongrand had a partition pulled 
down between two of the first-floor rooms, having ascertained 
that the depth of the house was sufficient to hold the book- 
shelves. He and Savinien hurried on the workmen, who 
cleaned, painted, and restored this little dwelling with such 
effect, that, by the end of March, Ursule could move from 
the inn and find in the plain little house a bedroom just like 
that from which the heirs had ejected her, for it was full of 


THE MIN ORE!' PROPERTY. 


181 


the furniture brought away by the justice at the removal of the 
seals. La Bougival, sleeping overhead, could be brought 
down at the call of a bell which hung by her young mistress' 
bed. 

The room intended for the library, the ground-floor sitting- 
room, and the kitchen, as yet unfurnished, were colored, 
repapered, and painted, awaiting the purchases the young girl 
might make at the sale of her godfather’s household goods. 

Though they well knew Ursule’s strength of character, the 
justice and the cure both dreaded for her the sudden transi- 
tion to a life so devoid of the elegance and luxury to which 
the doctor had always accustomed her. As to Savinien, he 
fairly wept over it ; and he had secretly given the workmen 
and the upholsterer more than one gratuity in order that 
Ursule should find no difference, in her own room at least, 
between the old and the new. But the young girl, who found 
all her happiness in Savinien’s eyes, showed the sweetest 
resignation. In these circumstances she charmed her two old 
friends, and proved to them, for the hundredth time, that 
only grief of heart could give her real suffering. Her sorrow 
at her godfather’s death was too deep for her to feel the bitter- 
ness of her changed fortunes, which, nevertheless, raised a 
fresh obstacle in the way of her marriage. Savinien’s dejec- 
tion at seeing her brought so low was such that she felt obliged 
to say in his ear, as they came out of church the morning of 
her moving into her new abode : 

“ Love cannot live without patience; we must wait.” 

As soon as the preamble to the inventory was drawn up, 
Massin, advised by Goupil, who turned to him in his covert 
hatred of Minoret, hoping for more from the usurer’s self- 
interest than from Zelie’s thriftiness, foreclosed on Madame 
and Monsieur de Portenduere, whose term for payment had 
lapsed. The old lady was stunned by a summons to pay up 
129,517 francs 55 centimes to the heirs-at-law within twenty- 
four hours, and interest from the day of the demand, under 


182 


URSULE MIROUET. 


penalty of the seizure of her landed estate. To borrow money 
to pay with was impossible. Savinien went to consult a lawyer 
at Fontainebleau. 

“ You have had a bad set to deal with who will make no com- 
promise ; their point is to drive you to extremities and take 
possession of the farm at Bordieres,” said the lawyer. “The 
best thing will be to effect a voluntary sale so as to avoid costs.” 

This melancholy news was a blow to the old Bretonne, to 
whom her son mildly remarked that if she had but consented 
to his marriage during Minoret’s lifetime, the doctor would 
have placed all his possessions in the hands of Ursule’s hus- 
band. At this moment they would have been enjoying wealth 
instead of suffering misery. Though spoken in no tone of 
reproach, this argument crushed the old lady quite as much as 
the notion of an immediate and violent eviction. 

Ursule, hardly recovered from her fever and the blow dealt 
her by the doctor’s next-of-kin, was bewildered with dismay 
when she heard of this fresh disaster. To love, and be unable 
to help the person beloved, is one of the most terrible pangs 
that the soul of a high-minded and delicately constituted 
woman can suffer. 

“I meant to buy my uncle’s house,” she said. “I will 
buy your mother’s instead.” 

“Is it possible ?” said Savinien. “You are under age, 
and cannot sell your securities without elaborate formalities, 
to which the public prosecutor would not give his consent. 
And, indeed, we shall attempt no resistance. All the town 
will look on with satisfaction at the discomfiture of a noble 
house. These townsfolk are like hounds at the death. Hap- 
pily, I still have ten thousand francs, on which my mother can 
live till this deplorable business is wound up. And, after all, 
the inventory of your godfather’s property is not yet com- 
plete. Monsieur Bongrand still hopes to find something for 
you. He is as much surprised as I am to find you left penni- 
less. The doctor so often spoke to him and to me of the 


THE MIN O RET PROPERTY. 


183 


handsome future he had prepared for you, that we cannot at 
ail understand this state of things.” 

“ Oh,” said she, “ if I can but buy the books and my god- 
father's furniture, that they may not be dispersed or pass into 
strange hands, I am content with my lot.” 

“ But who knows what price those rascally people may not 
set on the things you wish to have ! ” 

From Montargis to Fontainebleau the Minoret heirs, and 
the million they hoped to find, were the talk of the country; 
but the most careful search made throughout the house since 
the removal of the seals had led to no discovery. The hun- 
dred and twenty-nine thousand francs of the Portenduere 
mortgage, the fifteen thousand francs a year in three per cents., 
then quoted at sixty-five, and yielding a capital of three hun- 
dred and eighty thousand, the house, valued at forty thousand 
francs, and the handsome furniture, amounted to a total of 
about six hundred thousand francs, which the outer world 
thought a very consoling figure. 

Minoret had at this time some moments of acute uneasiness. 
La Bougival and Savinien, who, like the justice, persisted in 
believing in the existence of a will, came in after every day’s 
cataloguing to ask Bongrand the result of the investigations. 
The doctor's old friend would exclaim, as the clerks and the 
heirs-at-law quitted the premises: “I cannot understand it?” 

As, in the eyes of many superficial observers, two hundred 
thousand francs apiece to each inheritor seemed a very fair for- 
tune for the provinces, it never occurred to anyone to inquire 
how the doctor could have kept house as he had done on an 
income of no more than fifteen thousand francs, since he had 
never drawn the interest on the Portenduere mortgage. Bon- 
grand, Savinien, and the cure alone asked this question in 
Ursule’s interest, and, on hearing them give it utterance, the 
postmaster more than once turned pale. 

“ And yet we have certainly hunted everywhere — they to 
find a hoard, and I to find a will, in favor probably of Mon- 


184 


URSULE MIROUET \ 


sieur de Portenduere,” said the justice the day the inventory 
was finished and signed. “They have sifted the ash-heap, 
raised the marble tops, felt in his slippers, pulled the bed- 
steads to pieces, emptied the mattresses, run pins into the 
counterpanes and coverlets, turned out his eiderdown quilt, 
examined every scrap of paper, every drawer, dug over the 
ground in the cellar ; and I was ready to bid them pull the 
house down.” 

“What do you think about it?” asked the cure. “The 
will has been made away with by one of them.” 

“And the securities?” 

“ Try to find them ! Try to guess what such creatures 
would be at — as cunning, as wily, and as greedy as these 
Massins and Cremieres. Make what you can of such a fortune 
as this Minoret’s ; he gets two hundred thousand francs for 
his share, and he is going to sell his license, his house, and 
his interest in the Messageries for three hundred and fifty 
thousand ! What sums of money ! To say nothing of the 
savings on his thirty-odd thousand francs derived from real 
estate. Poor doctor ! ” 

“The will might have been hidden in the library ! ” said 
Savinien. 

“And, therefore, I did not dissuade the child from buying 
the books. But for that, would it not have been folly to let 
her spend all her ready money in books she will never look 
into?” 

The whole town had believed that the doctor’s godchild 
was in possession of the undiscoverable securities ; but when 
it was known beyond a doubt that her fourteen thousand 
francs in consols and her little personalty constituted her 
whole fortune, the doctor’s house and furniture excited the 
greatest curiosity. Some thought that bank-notes would be 
found in the stuffing of the chairs ; others that the old man 
must have hidden them in his books. The sale accordingly 
afforded the spectacle of the strange precautions taken by the 


THE MIN O RET PROPERTY. 


185 


heirs. Dionis, as auctioneer, explained with regard to each 
article put up for sale that the heirs-at-law were selling the 
piece of furniture only, and not anything that might be found 
in it; then, before parting with it, they all submitted it to the 
closest scrutiny, pinched it, tapped it, shook it ; and then 
gazed after it with the fond looks of a father parting with his 
only son for a voyage to the Indies. 

“Oh, mademoiselle,” said La Bougival, on her return from 
the first morning’s sale. “ I will not go again. Monsieur 
Bongrand is right ; you could not bear to see it. Everything 
is upside down. They come and go as if it were the street ; 
the handsomest furniture is used for anything that is wanted ; 
they stand upon it ; there is such a mess that a hen could not 
find her chicks ! You might think there had been a fire. 
Everything is turned out into the courtyard, the wardrobes 
all open and empty ! Oh, poor, dear man, it is lucky for him 
he is dead ! This sale would have been the death of him ! ” 

Bongrand, who was buying for Ursule the things of which 
the old man had been fond, and which were suitable for her 
small house, did not appear when the library was sold. 
Sharper than the heirs-at-law, whose greed would have made 
him pay too dear for the books, he gave a commission to a 
second-hand book-dealer at Melun, who came to Nemours on 
purpose, and who managed to secure several lots. As a 
consequence of the suspicions of the heirs, the books were 
sold one by one. Three thousand volumes were turned over, 
shaken one by one, held by the boards and fluttered, to make 
any paper fly out that might be hidden between the leaves; 
finally, the bindings and backs were closely examined. The 
lots secured for Ursule mounted up to about six thousand five 
hundred francs, half of her claims on the estate. 

The bookcase was not delivered over until it had been 
carefully examined by a cabinetmaker, noted for his experi- 
ence of secret drawers and panels, who was sent for expressly, 
from Paris. When the justice gave orders that the bookcase 


186 


URSULE MI ROUE T. 


and books should be conveyed to Mademoiselle Mirouet’s 
house, the heirs-at-law felt some vague alarms, which were 
subsequently dissipated by seeing that she was no richer than 
before. 

Minoret bought his uncle’s house, which the co-heirs ran 
up to about fifty thousand francs, imagining that the post- 
master hoped to find a treasure in the walls. And the deed 
of sale contained stipulations on this point. A fortnight after 
the conclusion of the whole business, Minoret, having sold 
his post-horses and his business to the son of a wealthy farmer, 
moved into his uncle’s house, on which he spent considerable 
sums in improvements and repairs. So Minoret condemned 
himself to live within a few yards of Ursule. 

“ I only hope,” said he to Dionis the day when Savinien 
and his mother had notice of the foreclosure, “that now we 
shall be rid of this precious nobility. We will turn them out, 
one by one.” 

“ The old lady, with her fourteen quarterings, will not 
stay to witness the disaster,” said Goupil. “She will go 
to die in Brittany, where, no doubt, she will find a wife 
for her son.” 

“ I don’t think so,” replied the notary, who, that morning, 
had drawn up the agreement of purchase for Bongrand. 
“ Ursule has just bought the widow Richard’s little house.” 

“That cursed little fool does not know what to do next to 
annoy us ! ” cried Minoret, very rashly. 

“ Why, what can it matter to you if she lives at Nemours?” 
asked Guopil, astonished at the vehement disgust shown by 
the great simpleton. 

“ Do you not know,” said Minoret, turning as red as a 
poppy, “ that my son is fool enough to be in love with her? 
I would give a hundred crowns to see Ursule well out of 
Nemours.” 

From this it is easy to understand how much Ursule, poor 
and resigned as she was, would be in Minoret’s way, with all 


THE MIN ORE T PROPERTY. 


187 


his money. The worry of securities to be realized, of selling 
his business, the expeditions consequent on such unwonted 
affairs, his disputes with his wife over every little detail, and 
the purchase of the doctor’s house, where Zelie wished to live 
quite plainly for her son’s sake — all this turmoil, so unlike 
the quiet course of his usual life, prevented the great Minoret 
from thinking of his victim. But a few days after he had 
settled in the Rue des Bourgeois, about the middle of May, 
on returning from a walk, he heard the sounds of a piano, 
and saw La Bougival sitting in the window, like a dragon 
guarding a treasure ; and at the same moment he heard an 
importunate voice within himself. 

An explanation of the reason why, in a man of his temper, 
the sight of Ursule, who did not even suspect the theft he 
had committed to her injury, became at once unendurable, 
why the sight of her dignity in misfortune filled him with the 
desire to get her out of the town, and why this desire assumed 
the character of hatred and passion, would lead perhaps to a 
complete moral treatise. Perhaps he felt that he was not the 
legitimate possessor of the thirty-six thousand francs while 
she to whom they belonged was so close to him. Perhaps he 
thought that by some chance his theft would be discovered, so 
long as those he had robbed were within reach. Perhaps, 
even, in a nature so primitive, so rough-hewn as his was, and 
hitherto always law-abiding, Ursule’s presence awoke some 
kind of remorse. Perhaps this remorse was the more poig- 
nant because he had so much more wealth than had been 
legitimately acquired. 

He no doubt ascribed these stirrings of his conscience 
wholly to Ursule’s presence, fancying that if she were out of 
sight these uncomfortable pangs would vanish too. Or per- 
haps, again, crime has its own counsel of perfection. An ill 
deed begun may demand its climax, a first blow may require 
a second — a death-blow. Robbery, perhaps, inevitably leads 
to murder. Minoret had committed the theft without a mo- 

T 


188 


URSULE M/ROUET. 


merit’s pause for reflection, events had crowded on so swiftly ; 
reflection came afterwards. Now, if the reader has fully pic- 
tured the appearance and build of this man, he will under- 
stand the prodigious results on him of an idea. Remorse is 
more than an idea ; it is the outcome of a feeling which can 
no more be smothered than love can, and which is tyrannous 
too. But just as Minoret had not hesitated for an instant 
to possess himself of the fortune intended for Ursule, so he 
mechanically felt the need of getting her away from Nemours 
when the sight of her cheated innocence stung him. Being 
an imbecile, he never considered consequences ; he went on 
from danger to danger, urged by his instinctive cupidity, like 
a wild animal which cannot foresee the wiles of the hunter, 
and trusts to its swiftness and strength. 

Before long the richer townspeople, who were wont to meet 
at the notary’s office, observed a change in the manners and 
demeanor of the man who had always been so light-hearted. 

“ I cannot think what has come over Minoret,” said his 
wife, to whom he had never revealed his bold stroke. “ He 
is ill anyhow.” 

The world at large accounted for Minoret’s being sick of 
himself — for in his face the expression of thought was one 
of boredom — by the fact that he had absolutely nothing to 
do, and by the transition from an active to an indolent life. 
While Minoret was scheming to crush Ursule’s life, La Bou- 
gival never let a day pass without making to her foster-child 
some allusion to the fortune she ought to have had, or com- 
paring her humble lot with that which the late “ Monsieur ” 
had intended her to enjoy, and of which he had spoken to 
her — La Bougival. 

“And besides,” said she, “it is not out of greediness; 
but would not monsieur, so kind as he was, have left me some 
little money ? ” 

“Am I not here?” Ursule would reply, and forbid any 
further words on the subject. 


THE MIN ORE T PROPERTY. 


189 


She could not bear the taint of any self-interested thought 
to touch the loving, melancholy and sweet memories which 
clung round the image of the old doctor, of whom a sketch 
in black and white chalk, done by her drawing-master, hung 
in her little sitting-room. To her fresh and strong imagina- 
tion the sight of this sketch was sufficient to bring her god- 
father before her ; she thought of him constantly, and was 
surrounded by the objects he had loved — his deep armchair, 
the furniture of his study, his backgammon-board, and the 
piano he had given her. The two old friends who remained 
to her, the Abbe Chaperon and Monsieur Bongrand, the only 
persons whose visits she would receive, were like two living 
memories of the past in the midst of the objects to which her 
regrets almost gave life — of that past which was linked to the 
present by the love which her godfather had approved and 
blessed. 

Ere long the sadness of her thoughts, insensibly softened 
by time, cast its hue on all her life, bringing everything into 
indefinable harmony ; exquisite neatness, perfect order in the 
arrangement of the furniture, a few flowers brought every 
morning by Savinien, pretty nothings, a stamp of peace set 
on everything by the young girl’s habits, and which made 
her home attractive. After breakfast and after church she 
regularly practiced and sang ; then she took her embroidery, 
sitting in the window towards the street. At four o’clock 
Savinien, on his return from the walk he took in all weathers, 
would find the window half-open, and sit on the outer sill to 
chat with her for half an hour. In the evening the cur£ or 
the justice would call, but she would never allow Savinien to 
accompany them. Nor would she accept a proposal from 
Madame de Portenduere, whom her son persuaded to invite 
Ursule to live with her. 

The young girl and La Bougival lived with the strictest 
economy ; they did not spend, on all included, more than 
sixty francs a month. The old nurse was indefatigable ; she 


190 


VRSULE MIROUET. 

washed and ironed, she cooked only twice a week, and kept 
the remains of the cooked food, which the mistress and maid 
ate cold ; for Ursule hoped to save seven hundred francs a 
year to pay the remainder of the price of her house. This 
austere conduct, with her modesty and resignation to a penuri- 
ous life, after having enjoyed a luxurious existence, when her 
lightest whims were worshiped, gained her the regard of cer- 
tain persons. She was respected, and never talked about. 
The heirs, once satisfied, did her full justice. Savinien ad- 
mired such strength of character in so young a girl. Now 
and again, on coming out of church, Madame de Porten- 
duere would say a few kind words to Ursule; she invited her 
to dinner twice, and came herself to fetch her. If it were 
not indeed happiness, at any rate it was peace. 

But a successful transaction, in which the justice displayed 
his old skill as a lawyer, brought to a head Minoret’s persecu- 
tion of Ursule, which had hitherto smoldered, and not gone 
beyond covert ill-will. As soon as the old doctor’s estate was 
fairly settled, the justice, at Ursule’s entreaty, took up the 
cause of the Portendueres, and undertook to get them out of 
their difficulties ; but, in calling on the old lady, whose oppo- 
sition to Ursule’s happiness made him furious, he did not 
conceal from her that he was devoting himself to her interests 
solely to please Mademoiselle Mirouet. He selected one of 
his former clerks to plead for the Portendueres at Fontaine- 
bleau, and himself conducted the appeal for a decree against 
foreclosure. He intended to take advantage of the interval 
of time which must elapse between the granting of this decree 
and Massin’s renewed appeal to re-let the farm at a rent of 
six thousand francs, and to extract from the lessee a good 
premium and the payment of a year’s rent in advance. 
Thenceforth the whist parties met again at Madame de Por- 
tenduere’s, consisting of himself and the cure, Savinien and 
Ursule, for whom the justice and the abbe called every even- 
ing, and they saw her home again. 


THE MIN ORE T PR 0 PER TY. 191 

In June, Bongrand got his decree annulling the proceedings 
taken by Massin against the Portendueres. He at once signed 
a new lease ; got thirty-two thousand francs from the farmer, 
and a rent of six thousand francs a year for eight years ; then, 
in the evening, before the transactions could get abroad, he 
went to Z61ie, who, as he knew, was puzzled for an investment 
for her savings, and suggested to her that she should buy 
Bordieres for two hundred and twenty thousand francs. 

“ I would clinch the bargain on the spot,” said Minoret, 
“ if only I were sure that the Portendueres were going to live 
anywhere than at Nemours.” 

“ Why?” asked the justice. 

“We want to be quit of nobles at Nemours,” frankly an- 
swered Minoret. 

“I fancy I have heard the old lady say that if she could 
settle matters, she could live nowhere but in Brittany on what 
would be left. She talks of selling her house.” 

“ Well, sell it to me then,” said Minoret. 

“ But you talk as if the money were yours ! ” said Zelie. 
“ What are you going to do with two houses?” 

“ If I do not settle the matter of the farm with you this 
evening,” said the justice, “ our lease will become known ; 
we shall have fresh proceedings against us in three days, and 
I shall fail to pull the thing through. My heart is set on it ; 

I shall go on, this very hour, to Melun, where some farmers I 
know will take Bordieres off my hands with their eyes shut. 
Then you will have lost the opportunity of an investment at 
three per cent, in the district of Le Rouvre.” 

“ And why then did you come to us ? ” said Zelie. 

“ Because I know you to be rich, while my older clients 
will want a few days to enable them to hand over a hundred 
and twenty-nine thousand francs. I want no delays.” 

“ Get her away from Nemours, and they are yours ! ” said 
Minoret. 

“You must see that I cannot pledge the Portendueres in 


192 


URSULE MIROUET. 

any way/’ replied Bongrand, “but I feel sure that they will 
not remain at Nemours.” 

On this assurance Minoret, to whom Zelie gave a nudge, 
undertook to pay off the Portendueres’ debt to the doctor’s 
estate. The contract for the sale was made out by Dionis, 
and the justice, very content, made Minoret agree to the 
terms of the renewed lease, though he perceived rather late, as 
well as Zelie, that the rent was payable a year in advance, 
leaving the last year, in point of fact, rent free. 

By the end of June, Bongrand could take Madame de 
Portenduere a receipt in full and the remnant of her fortune, 
a hundred and twenty-nine thousand francs, which he advised 
her to invest in state securities at five per cent., as well as 
Savinien’s ten thousand; this yielded an income of about six 
thousand francs a year. Thus, instead of having lost, the old 
lady had gained two thousand francs a year by the sale of her 
estate. She and her son therefore remained at Nemours. 

Minoret thought he had been tricked, as if the justice could 
possibly have known that it was Ursule’s presence that was 
intolerable to him, and felt a deep resentment, which added 
to his hatred of his victim. Then began the covert drama, 
terrible in its effects, the struggle between two persons’ 
feelings: Minoret’s, which prompted him to drive Ursule to 
ieave Nemours; and Ursule’s, which gave her the fortitude to 
endure a persecution of which the cause for long remained 
inexplicable, a singular state of things to which previous 
events had all led up and conduced, and to which they had 
been the prologue. 

Madame Minoret, to whom her husband presented plate 
and a dinner service worth altogether twenty thousand francs, 
gave a handsome dinner every Sunday, the day on which her 
son brought friends over from Fontainebleau. For these 
banquets Zelie would send for some rare dainties from Paris, 
thus inciting Dionis the notary to imitate her display. 
Goupil, whom the Minorets did their utmost to banish as a 


THE Ml NO RET PROPERTY. 


193 


man of ill-repute and a blot on their magnificence, was not 
invited to the house till the end of July, a month after the 
retirement into private ease of the old postmaster and 
mistress. The clerk, quite alive to this deliberate neglect, 
was obliged to treat even Desire with formality, and drop the 
familiar tu ; and Desire, since his appointment to official 
"life, had assumed a grave and haughty air even among his 
family. 

“You have forgotten Esther, then, since you are in love 
with Mademoiselle Mirouet?” said Goupil to the young 
lawyer. 

“ In the first place, Esther is dead, monsieur. And, in the 
second, I never thought of Ursule,” was the reply. 

“Hey day — what did you tell me, Daddy Minoret?” 

. cried Goupil audaciously. 

Minoret, caught in the very act by so formidable a foe, 
would have been put out of countenance but for the scheme 
for which he had invited Goupil to dinner, remembering the 
proposal formerly made by the clerk to hinder Ursule’s mar- 
riage to young Portenduere. His only answer was to lead the 
clerk abruptly away and out into the garden. 

“You are nearly eight-and-twenty, my good fellow,” said 
he, “ and I do not see that you are on the high-road to for- 
tune. I wish you well ; for, after all, you were my son’s 
companion. Listen to me : If you can persuade that little 
Mirouet to become your wife — she has forty thousand francs 
at any rate — as sure as my name is Minoret, I will give you 
the money to buy a business at Orleans.” 

“ No,” said Goupil, “ I should never become known. At 
Montargis ” 

“No,” interrupted Minoret, “but at Sens ” 

“Very good, say Sens,” replied the hideous clerk. “It 
is an archbishop’s see, and I have no objection to a religious 
centre. A little hypocrisy helps one to get on. Besides, the 
girl is very pious ; she will be a success there.” 

13 


194 


URSULE MIROUET. 

“ It must be quite understood that I only give the hundred 
thousand francs in consideration of my young relative’s mar- 
riage. I wish to provide for her out of regard for my deceased 
uncle.” 

“And why not out of regard for me?” said Goupil mis- 
chievously, for he suspected some secret motive for Minoret’s 
conduct. “ Was it not information given by me that enabled 
you to get twenty-four thousand francs in rent from a single 
holding in a ring fence round the Chateau du Rouvre ? With 
your meadows and mill on the other side of the Loing you 
can add sixteen thousand to that. Come, old Burly, will you 
play your game with me above board ? ’ ’ 

“Yes.” 

“Well, just to make you feel my claws, I was brewing a 
plan with Massin to get possession of Le Rouvre — park, gar- 
dens, preserves, timber, and all.” 

“ You had better ! ” exclaimed Zelie, interrupting them. 

“Well,” said Goupil, with a viperine glance at her, “if I 
choose, Massin will have it all to-morrow for two hundred 
thousand francs.” 

“Leave us, wife,” said the colossus, taking Zelie by the 
arm, and turning her about. “ We understand each other. 
We have had so much business on our hands,” he went on, 
coming back to Goupil, “ that we have not been able to think 
of you ; but I rely on your friendship to let us get Le 
Rouvre.” 

“An old marquisate,” said Goupil slyly, “which in your 
hands will soon be worth fifty thousand francs a year — more 
than two millions at the present price of money.” 

“ And then our boy can marry the daughter of a Marshal 
of France, or the heiress of some ancient house, which will 
help him on to be a judge in Paris,” said the postmaster, 
opening his huge snuff-box, and offering it to Goupil. 

“Well, then, all is square and above board?” asked 
Goupil, shaking his fingers. 


THE MIN O RET PROPERTY. 


195 


Minoret wrung his hand and said — 

“ My word of honor.” 

Like all cunning men, the clerk fancied, happily for 
Minoret, that this marriage with Ursule was a mere excuse 
for making up to him, now he had been playing off Massin 
against them. 

“It is not his doing,” said he to himself. “I know my 
Zelie’s hand ; she has taught him his part. Bah ! Let 
Massin slide ! Within three years I shall be returned as 
depute for Sens,” he thought. 

Then, catching sight of Bongrand on his way to his game 
of whist over the way, he rushed into the street. 

“You take a great interest in Ursule MirouSt, my dear 
Monsieur Bongrand,” said he; “you cannot be indifferent 
to her future prospects. This is our programme. She may 
marry a notary whose business is to be in a large district 
town. This notary, who will certainly be depute in three 
years, will settle a hundred thousand francs on her.” 

“She can do better,” said Bongrand stiffly. “Since 
Madame de Portendudre’s misfortunes her health is failing. 
Yesterday she looked dreadfully ill ; she is dying of grief. 
Savinien will have six thousand francs a year ; Ursule has 
forty thousand francs; I will invest their capital on Massin’s 
principle — but honestly — and in ten years they will have a 
little fortune.” 

“ Savinien would be a fool. He can marry Mademoiselle 
du Rouvre any day he likes, an only daughter, to whom her 
uncle and aunt will also leave splendid fortunes.” 

“‘When love has gotten hold of us, farewell prudence/ 
says La Fontaine. But who is this worthy notary, for, after 
all ?” said Bongrand, out of curiosity. 

“ I,” said Goupil, in a tone that made the justice start. 

“ You ? ” said he, not attempting to conceal his disgust. 

“Very good, sir; your servant,” retorted Goupil, with a 
glare of venom, hatred, and defiance. 


196 


URSULE MIROUET. 


“ Would you like to be the wife of a notary who will settle 
a hundred thousand francs on you ? ” cried Bongrand, enter- 
ing the little sitting-room, and speaking to Ursule, who was 
sitting by Madame de Portenduere. Ursule and Savinien 
started as if by one impulse, and looked at each other; she 
with a smile, he not daring to show his uneasiness. 

“I am not my own mistress,” replied Ursule, holding out 
her hand to Savinien in such a way that his old mother could 
not see it. 

“I refused the offer without consulting you even.” 

“But why?” said Madame de Portenduere. “It seems 
to me, my dear, that a notary’s profession is a very respectable 
one.” 

“I prefer my peaceful poverty,” she replied, “for it is 
opulence in comparison with what I had a right to expect of 
life. My old nurse spares me many anxieties, and I would 
not exchange my present lot, which suits me, for an unknown 
future. ’ ’ 

Next morning the post brought a poisoned dart to two 
hearts in the shape of two anonymous letters — one to Madame 
de Portenduere, and one to Ursule. This is the letter re- 
ceived by the old lady : 

“You love your son, you would wish to see him married as 
beseems the name he bears, and you are fostering his fancy 
for an ambitious little thing without any fortune, by receiving 
at your house one Ursule, the daughter of a regimental band- 
master ; while you might marry him to Mademoiselle du 
Rouvre, whose two uncles, the Marquis de Ronquerolles and 
the Chevalier du Rouvre, each having thirty thousand francs a 
year, intend to settle a large sum on their niece on her mar- 
riage, so as not to leave their fortune to her foolish old father, 
M. du Rouvre, who wastes his substance. Madame de Serizy 
— Aunt Clementine du Rouvre — who has just lost her only 
son in Algiers, will no doubt also adopt her niece. Some 


THE MIN 0 RET PROPERTY. 


197 


one who wishes you well believes that Savinien would be 
accepted.’ * 

This is the letter written to Ursule : 

“ Dear Ursule: — There is in Nemours a young man who 
idolizes you ; he cannot see you at work at your window with- 
out such emotions as prove to him that his love is for life. 
This young man is gifted with a will of iron and a persever- 
ance which nothing can daunt. Accept his love with favor, 
for his intentions are of the purest, and he humbly asks your 
hand in the hope of making you happy. His fortune, though 
suitable even now, is nothing to what he will make it when 
you are his wife. You will some day be received at court as 
the wife of a minister, and one of the first ladies in the land. 
As he sees you every day, though you cannot see him, place 
one of La Bougival’s pots of pinks in your window, and that 
will tell him that he may appear before you.” 

Ursule burnt this letter without mentioning it to Savinien. 
Two days later she received another, in these terms : 

“You were wrong, dear Ursule, not to reply to him who 
loves you better than his life. You fancy you will marry 
Savinien, but you are strangely mistaken. That marriage will 
never take place. Madame de Portenduere, who will see you 
no more at her house, is going this morning to La Rouvre, 
on foot, in spite of the weak state she is in, to ask Made- 
moiselle du Rouvre in marriage for Savinien. He will finally 
yield. What objection can he make ? The young lady’s 
uncles will settle their fortune on their niece at her marriage. 
That fortune amounts to sixty thousand francs a year.” 

This letter tortured Ursule’s heart by making her acquainted 
with the torments of jealousy, pangs hitherto unknown, which, 
to her finely organized nature, so alive to suffering, swamped 
the present, the future, and even the past in grief. From the 


198 


URSULE MIROUET. 


moment when she received this fatal missive, she sat motion- 
less in the doctor’s armchair, her eyes fixed on vacancy, and 
lost in a sorrowful reverie. In an instant the chill of death had 
come on her instead of the glow of exquisite life. Alas ! It 
was worse ; it was, in fact, the dreadful awakening of the 
dead to find that there is no God — the masterpiece of that 
strange genius Jean Paul. Four times did La Bougival try to 
persuade Ursule to eat her breakfast ; she saw the girl take up 
her bread and lay it down again, unable to carry it to her 
lips. When she ventured to offer a remonstrance, Ursule 
stopped her with a wave of the hand, saying Hush ! in a 
terrible tone, as despotic as it had hitherto always been sweet. 
La Bougival, watching her mistress through a glass door be- 
tween the rooms, saw her turn alternately as red as if fever 
were consuming her, and then blue, as though an ague fit had 
followed the fever. By about four o’clock, when Ursule rose 
every few minutes to look whether Savinien was coming, and 
Savinien came not, she became evidently worse. Jealousy 
and doubt destroy all the bashfulness of love. Ursule, who 
till now had never allowed her passion to be detected in the 
least gesture, put on her hat and her little shawl, and ran into 
the passage to go out and meet Savinien ; but a remnant of 
reserve brought her back into the little sitting-room. There 
she wept. 

When the cure came in the evening, the poor old nurse 
stopped him on the threshold. 

“ Oh, Monsieur le Cure, I do not know what ails mademoi- 
selle ; she ” 

“ I know,” said the priest sadly, silencing the frightened 
attendant. 

The abb£ then told Ursule what she had not dared to ask : 
u Madame de Portenduere had gone to dine at Le Rouvre.” 

“ And Savinien ? ” 

“ He too.” 

Ursule shuddered nervously— a shudder which thrilled the 


THE MI NO RET PROPERTY. 


199 


Abbe Chaperon as though he had received a shock from a 
Leyden jar, and he felt a painful turmoil at his heart. 

“ So we shall not go to her house this evening,” said he. 
“ But, indeed, my child, you will be wise never to go there 
again. The old lady might receive you in a way that would 
wound your pride. We, having brought her to listen to the 
idea of your marriage to Savinien, cannot imagine what ill- 
wind has blown to change her views in an instant.” 

“ I am prepared for anything; nothing can astonish me 
now,” said Ursule in a tone of conviction. “ In such ex- 
tremities it is a great comfort to feel that I have done nothing 
to offend God.” 

“ Submit, my dear daughter, and never try to inquire into 
the ways of Providence,” said the cure. 

“ I do not wish to show any unjust suspicion of M. de Por- 
tenduere’s character ” 

“ Why do you no longer call him Savinien?” asked the 
abbe, observing a certain bitterness in Ursule’s tone. 

“ My dear Savinien ! ” she went on, with a burst of tears. 
“Yes, my good friend,” she said, sobbing, “a voice assures 
me that his heart is as noble as his birth. He has not merely 
told me that he loves me; he has proved it in a thousand 
delicate ways, and by heroically controlling the ardor of his 
passion. Lately, when he took my hand that I held out to 
him, when Monsieur Bongrand proposed to me for a notary, 

I declare to you that it was the first time I had ever offered it 
to him. Though he began, by a jest, blowing me a kiss across 
the street, since then our affection has never once, as you 
know, overstepped the strictest limits ; but I may tell you — 
you who read my whole soul excepting the one spot which is 
open only to the angels — well,, this affection is in me the 
foundation of many virtues. It has enabled me to accept 
my poverty ; it has, perhaps, softened the bitterness of the 
irreparable loss for which I mourn now more in my garments 
than in my heart ! Yes, I have done wrong — for my love 


200 


URSULE MIROUET. 


has been greater than my gratitude to my godfather; and 
God has avenged him ! How could I help it? What I valued 
myself for was as Savinien’s wife. I have been too proud ; 
and it is that pride, perhaps, that God is punishing. God 
alone, as you have often told me, ought to be the spring and 
end of all we do.” 

The cure was touched as he saw the tears rolling down her 
cheeks, already paler. The greater the poor girl’s confidence 
had been, the lower she had fallen. 

“ However,” she went on, “reduced once more to my or- 
phaned state, I shall be able to accustom myself to the proper 
frame of mind. After all, could I bear to be a stone round 
the neck of the man I love ! What should he do here ? Who 
am I that I should aspire to him ? Do I not love him with 
such perfect love that it is equal to a complete sacrifice of my 
happiness, of my hopes? And you know I have often blamed 
myself for setting my love on a tomb, and looking forward 
to the morrow of that old lady’s death. If Savinien can be 
rich and happy through another woman, I have just money 
enough to purchase my admission to a convent, to which I 
shall at once retire. There ought not to be two loves in a 
woman’s heart, any more than there are two Lords in heaven. 
The religious life will have its charms for me.” 

“ He could not allow his mother to go alone to Le 
Rouvre,” said the kind priest gently. 

“ We will talk no more of it, my dear Monsieur Chaperon. 
I will write to him this evening to give him his liberty. I 
am glad to be obliged to close the windows of my sitting- 
room.” 

She then told him about the anonymous letters, saying that 
she would offer no encouragement to this unknown suitor. 

“Ah! then it is an anonymous letter that has prompted 
Madame de Portenduere’s expedition to Le Rouvre!” ex- 
claimed the cur£. “You are, no doubt, the object of some 
malignant persecution.” 


THE MIN O RET PROPERTY. 


201 


“ But why? Neither Savinien nor I have injured any one, 
and we are doing no harm to any one here.” 

“ Well, well, my child. We will take advantage of this 
tornado which has broken up our little party to arrange our 
poor old friend’s books ; they are still piled in disorder. 
Bongrand and I will set them straight, for we had thought of 
hunting through them. Put your trust in God ; but remem- 
ber, too, that in the justice and myself you have two devoted 
friends.” 

“And that is much,” she said, walking to the end of the 
little alley with the priest, and craning her neck like a bird 
looking out of its nest, still hoping to see Savinien. 

At this instant Minoret and Goupil, coming home from a 
walk in the country, stopped as they were passing, and the 
heir-at-law said to Ursule — 

“What is the matter, cousin? — for we are still cousins, are 
we not? You look altered.” 

Goupil cast such ardent eyes on Ursule that she was fright- 
ened. She ran in without replying. 

“ She is a wild bird,” said Minoret to the cure. 

“ Mademoiselle Mirouet is quite right not to talk to men 
on her doorstep; she is too young ” 

“Oh!” said Goupil; “you must be well aware that she 
does not lack lovers ! ” 

The cure bowed hastily, and hurried off to the Rue des 
Bourgeois. 

“Well,” said the lawyer’s clerk to Minoret, “the fat is 
burning. She is as pale as death already ; within a fortnight 
she will have left the town. You will see.” 

“It is better to have you for a friend than for an enemy,” 
said Minoret, struck by the horrible smile which gave to 
Goupil’s face the diabolical expression which Joseph Bridau 
gave to Goethe’s Mephistopheles. 

“ I believe you ! ” replied Goupil. “If she will not marry 
me, I will make her die of grief.” 


202 


URSULE MIROUET. 


“Do so, boy, and I will give you money enough to start 
in business in Paris. Then you can marry a rich wife M 

“Poor girl! — why, what harm has she done to you?” 
asked the clerk in surprise. 

“ I am sick of her,” said Minoret roughly. 

“ Only wait till Monday, and you shall see how I will make 
her squirm,” replied Goupil, studying the postmaster’s coun- 
tenance. 

Next morning La Bougivalwent to see Savinien, and as she 
gave him a note, she said, “ I don’t know what the dear child 
has written to you about, but she looks like a corpse this 
morning.” 

Who, on reading this letter to Savinien, can fail to picture 
the sufferings Ursule must have endured during the past night? 

“ My dear Savinien : — Your mother wishes you to marry 
Mademoiselle du Rouvre, I am told ; perhaps she is right. 
You see yourself between a life almost of poverty and a posi- 
tion of wealth, between the wife of your heart and a woman of 
fashion, between obedience to your mother and obedience to 
your own choice — for I still believe that I am your choice. 
Savinien, since you must decide, I wish that you should do so 
in perfect freedom. I give you back your word — given not 
to me, but to yourself, at a moment which I can never forget, 
and which, like all the days that have passed since then, was 
angelically pure and sweet. That memory will be enough for 
me to live on. If you should persist in adhering to your 
vows, a dark and dreadful thought would always trouble my 
happiness. In the midst of our privations, which you now 
take so lightly, you might afterwards reflect that, if you had 
but followed the rules of the world, things might have been 
very different with you. If you were the man to utter such a 
thought, it would be my death-warrant in bitter anguish ; and 
if you did not say it, I should be suspicious of the slightest 
cloud on your brow. Dear Savinien, I have always cared for 


THE MIAORET PROPERTY. 


203 


you more than for anything on earth. I might do so ; for 
my godfather, though jealous of you, said to me, ‘ Love him, 
my child ! you will certainly be his, and he yours some day.’ 
When I went to Paris I loved you without hope, and that love 
was enough for me. I do not know whether I can revert to 
that state of mind, but I will try. What are we to each other 
at this moment? A brother and sister. Let us remain so. 
Marry the happy girl, whose joy it will be to restore to your 
name the lustre due to it, which I, according to your mother, 
must tarnish. You shall never hear me mentioned. The 
world will applaud you ; I, believe me, shall never blame you, 
and shall always love you. So, farewell.' ’ 

“ Wait ! ” cried the young man. He made La Bougival 
sit down, and, going to his desk, he hastily wrote these few 
lines : 

“ My dear Ursule : — Your letter breaks my heart, for you 
are inflicting on yourself much useless pain, and for the first 
time our hearts have failed to understand each other. That 
you are not already my wife is because I cannot yet marry 
without my mother’s consent. After all, are not eight thou- 
sand francs a year, in a pretty cottage on the banks of the 
Loing, quite a fortune ? We calculated that, with La Bougi- 
val, we could save five thousand francs a year. You allowed 
me one evening in your uncle’s garden to regard you as my 
promised wife, and you cannot by yourself alone break the 
ties which bind us both. Need I tell you that I plainly 
declared, yesterday, to Monsieur du Rouvre that, even if I 
were free, I would not accept a fortune from a young lady 
whom I did not know ? My mother refuses to see you any 
more ; I lose the happiness of my evenings, but do not 
abridge the brief moments when I may speak with you at 

your window. Till this evening, then Nothing can 

part us.” 


204 


URSULE M1ROUET. 


“ Go now, my good woman. She must not have a moment’s 
needless anxiety.” 

That afternoon, on his return from the walk he took every 
day on purpose to pass by Ursule’s dwelling, Savinien found 
her somewhat the paler for all these sudden agitations. 

“ I feel as though I had never till this moment known what 
a happiness it is to see you,” said she. 

“ You yourself said to me,” replied Savinien, with a smile, 
“ that ‘ Love cannot exist without patience ; I will wait ’ — 
for I remember all your words. But have you, my dear child, 
divided love from faith ? Ah ! this is the end of all our dif- 
ferences. You have always said that you loved me more than 
I could love you. But have I ever doubted you? ” he asked, 
giving her a bunch of wildflowers chosen so as to symbolize 
his feelings. 

“You have no reason to doubt me,” she replied. “Be- 
sides, you do not know all,” she added, in a tone of 
uneasiness. 

She had given orders that no letters to her by post should 
be taken in. But without her being able to guess by what 
conjuring trick the thing had been done, a few minutes after 
Savinien had left her, and she had watched him round the 
turning of the Rue des Bourgeois out of the High Street, 
she found on her armchair a piece of paper on which was 
written — 

“ Tremble ! the lover scorned will be worse than a tiger.” 

Notwithstanding Savinien’s entreaties, she would not, out 
of prudence, trust him with the dreadful secret of her fears. 
The ineffable joy of seeing him again, after believing him 
lost to her, could alone enable her to forget the mortal chill 
which came over her. Every one knows the intolerable tor- 
ment of awaiting an indefinite misfortune. Suffering then 
assumes the proportions of the unknown, which is certainly 
infinitude, to the mind. To Ursule it was the greatest 
anguish. She found herself starting violently at the slightest 


THE M/NO EE T PROPERTY. 


206 


sound ; she distrusted the silence ; she suspected the walls of 
conspiracies. Her peaceful sleep was broken. Goupil, with- 
out knowing anything of her constitution — as fragile as that 
of a flower — had, by the instinct of wickedness, hit on the 
poison that would blight it — kill it. 

The next day, however, passed without any shock. Ursule 
played the piano till very late, and went to bed almost re- 
assured, and overpowered by sleep. At about midnight she 
was roused by a band, consisting of a clarionet, a hautboy, a 
flute, a cornet-a-pistons, a trombone, a bassoon, a fife, and a 
triangle. All the neighbors were at their windows. The 
poor child, upset by seeing a crowd in the street, was struck 
to the heart on hearing a hoarse, vulgar man’s voice crying 
out — 

“ For the fair Ursule Mirouet, a serenade from her lover ! ” 

At church next morning all the town was in a hubbub ; 
and as Ursule entered and quitted the church, she saw the 
square filled with groups staring at her, and displaying the 
most odious curiosity. The serenade had set every tongue 
wagging, for every one was lost in conjecture. Ursule got 
home more dead than alive, and went out no more, the cure 
having advised her to say vespers at home. On going in she 
saw, lying in the passage paved with red brick that ran from 
the street to the courtyard behind, a letter that had been 
slipped under the door ; she picked it up and read it, prompted 
by the desire for some explanation. The least sensitive reader 
can imagine her feelings as she saw these terrible words : 

“ Make up your mind to be my wife, rich and adored. I 
will have you. If you are not mine alive, you shall be, dead. 
You may ascribe to your refusal misfortunes which will not 
fall on you alone. He who loves you and will some day 
possess YOU.” 

Strange irony ! at the moment when the gentle victim 


URSULE MIROUET. 


200 


of this conspiracy was drooping like a plucked flower, 
Mesdemoiselles Massin, Dionis, and Cremiere were envying 
her lot. 

“She is a happy girl,” they were saying. “Men are 
devoted to her, flatter her taste, are ready to quarrel for her. 
The serenade was delightful, it would seem ! There was a 
cornet-a-pistons ! ” 

“ What is a cornet-d-pistons ? ” 

“ A new sort of musical instrument — there — as long as 
that ! ” said Angelique Cremiere to Pamela Massin. 

Early the next day Savinien went off to Fontainebleau to 
inquire who had ordered the musicians of the regiment 
stationed there ; but, as there were two men to each instru- 
ment, it was impossible to ascertain which one had gone to 
Nemours, since the colonel prohibited them from playing 
for private persons without his leave. Monsieur de Porten- 
duere had an interview with the public prosecutor, Ursule’s 
legal guardian, and explained to him the serious effect such 
scenes must have on a young girl so delicate and fragile as she 
was, begging him to find out the instigator of this serenade 
by means that the law could set in motion. 

Three days later, in the middle of the night, a second 
serenade was given by three violins, a flute, a guitar, and a 
hautboy. On this occasion the musicians made off by the 
road to Montargis, where there was just then a troupe of 
actors. Between two pieces a strident and drunken voice 
had proclaimed : 

“To the daughter of Bandmaster Mirouet.” 

Thus all Nemours was apprised of the profession of Ursule’s 
father, the secret the old doctor had so carefully kept. 

But this time Savinien did not go to Montargis ; he received 
in the course of the day an anonymous letter from Paris con- 
taining this terrible prophecy : 

“ You shall not marry Ursule. If you wish her to live., 
make haste and surrender her to him who loves her more than 


THE MINOR ET PROPERTY. 


207 


you do ; for he has become a musician and an artist to please 
her, and would rather see her dead than as your wife.” 

By this time the town doctor of Nemours was seeing Ursule 
three times a day, for this covert persecution had brought her 
to the point of death. Plunged, as she felt herself, by a 
diabolical hand into a slough of mud, the gentle girl behaved 
like a martyr; she lay perfectly silent, raising her eyes to 
heaven, without tears, awaiting further blows with fervent 
prayer, and hoping for the stroke that might be her death. 

“ I am glad to be unable to go downstairs,” said she to 
Monsieur Bongrand and the abbe, who stayed with her as 
much as possible. 11 He would come, and I feel unworthy 
to meet the looks with which he is in the habit of making me 
blest. Do you think he doubts me ? ” 

“Why, if Savinien cannot discover the moving spirit of all 
this shameful business, he means to ask for the intervention of 
the Paris police,” said Bongrand. 

“ The unknown persons must know that they have killed 
me,” she replied. “ They will be quiet now.” 

The cure, Bongrand, and Savinien puzzled themselves with 
conjectures and suppositions. Savinien, Tiennette, La Bou- 
gival, and two devoted adherents of the curb’s constituted 
themselves 'spies, and were constantly on the watch for a 
whole week ; but Goupil could never be betrayed by a sign, 
he pulled all the wires with his own hand. The justice was 
the first to suspect that the author of the evil was frightened 
at his own success. Ursule was as pale and weak as a con- 
sumptive English girl. The spies relaxed their efforts. There 
were no more serenades nor letters. Savinien ascribed the 
cessation of these odious means to the secret energy of the 
law officers, to whom he had sent the letters written to Ursule, 
to himself, and to his mother. 

The armistice was of no long duration. When the doctor 
had checked the course of Ursule’s nervous fever, just as she 


208 


URSULE MIROUET. 


was recovering her spirit, one morning, about the middle of 
July, a ladder of ropes was found attached to her window. 
The postillion who had ridden with the night mail deposed 
that a little man was in the act of coming down it just as he 
was passing ; but in spite of his wishing to stop, his horses, 
having set off down hill from the bridge, at the corner of 
which stood Ursule’s little house, had carried him some way 
out of Nemours. 

An opinion, suggested in Dionis’ drawing-room, attributed 
these manoeuvres to the Marquis du Rouvre, at that time in 
great need of money, who, it was supposed, by hastening 
Savinien’s marriage with his daughter, would be able to save 
the Chateau of Le Rouvre from his creditors. Madame de 
Portenduere also, it was said, looked with favor on anything 
that could discredit, dishonor, and blight Ursule ; but when 
the young girl seemed likely to die, the old lady was almost 
conquered. 

This last stroke of malice so much distressed the Cure 
Chaperon that it made him ill enough to compel him to 
remain at home for some days. Poor Ursule, in whom this 
cruel attack had brought on a relapse, received by post a 
note from the cure, which was not refused, as his writing 
was familiar. 

“ My child, leave Nemours, and so discomfort the malice 
of your unknown enemies. Perhaps what they aim at is to 
imperil Savinien’s life. I will tell you more when I can go 
to see you.” This note was signed, “Your devoted friend 
Chaperon.” 

When Savinien, almost driven mad, went to call on the 
priest, the poor man read and re-read the letter, so much was 
he horrified at the perfection with which his writing and 
signature had been imitated, for he had written nothing, and, 
if he had written, he would not have employed the post to 
carry a letter to Ursule. The mortal anguish to which this 
last villainy reduced Ursule compelled Savinien once more to 


THE MI NO RET PROPERTY. 


209 


apply to the public prosecutor, showing him the forged letter 
from the abbe. 

“ It is murder,” said the young man to the lawyer. “ Mur- 
der is being committed by means not provided against by law, 
on the person of an orphan placed under your protection by 
the Civil Code.” 

“If you can discover any means of interfering,” replied 
the public prosecutor, “I am ready to adopt them; but I 
know of none. This rascally anonymous letter gives the best 
advice. Mademoiselle Mirouet must be sent to the care of 
the Ladies of the Adoration. Meanwhile, by my order, the 
commissary of police at Fontainebleau will authorize you to 
carry weapons in your own defense. I myself have been to 
Le Rouvre, and Monsieur du Rouvre is justifiably indignant 
at the suspicions that have attached to him. Minoret, my 
deputy’s father, is in treaty for the purchase of his chateau. 
Mademoiselle du Rouvre is to marry a rich Polish count. 
Monsieur du Rouvre himself was about to leave the neighbor- 
hood on the day of my visit, to escape being seized for debt.” 

Desire, questioned by his chief, dared not say what he 
thought ; he recognized Goupil in all this. Goupil alone 
was capable of conducting a plot which should thus shave 
close to the Penal Code without being amenable to any of its 
provisions. The impunity, the secrecy, the success of it, in- 
creased Goupil’s audacity. The terrible man had set Massin, 
who had become his dupe, on the tracks of the Marquis du 
Rouvre, to compel that gentleman to sell the rest of his land 
to Minoret. After opening negotiations with a notary at 
Sens, he determined to try a last stroke to gain possession of 
Ursule. He thought he could imitate some young men of 
Paris, who owed their wife and fortune to an elopement. His 
services done to Minoret, Massin, and Cremiere, and the pro- 
tection of Dionis, mayor of Nemours, would allow of his 
hushing the matter up. He at once determined to cast off his 
mask, believing that Ursule was incapable of resistance in the 
14 


210 


URSULE MIROUET. 


state of weakness to which he had brought her. However, 
before risking the last card of his base game, he thought it 
well to have an explanation at Le Rouvre, whither he went 
with Minoret, who was going there for the first time since the 
agreement was signed. 

Minoret had just received a confidential letter from his 
son, asking him for information as to what was going on with 
regard to Ursule, before going himself with the public prose- 
cutor to place her in a convent safe from any further atrocity. 
The young lawyer besought his father to give him his best 
advice, if this persecution were the work of one of their 
friends. Though justice could not always punish, she would 
at last find everything out and make good note of it. Min- 
oret had achieved his great end ; he was now the immovable 
owner of the Chateau du Rouvre, one of the finest in all the 
Gaiinais, and he could derive forty-odd thousand francs a 
year from the rich and beautiful land surrounding the park. 
The colossus could laugh at Goupil now. Moreover, he 
meant to live in the country, where the memory of Ursule 
would haunt him no more. 

“ My boy,” said he to Goupil, as they paced the terrace, 
“ leave my little cousin in peace ! ” 

“Pooh ! ” said the clerk, who could make nothing of his 
capricious behavior, for even stupidity has its depths. 

“ Oh, I am not ungrateful : you have helped me to get, for 
two hundred and eighty thousand francs, this fine mansion of 
brick and hewn stone, which certainly could not now be built 
for nearly five times the price, with the home farm, the park, 
the gardens, and timber — Well, yes, I will, on my word — I 
will give you ten per cent. — twenty thousand francs, with 
which you can buy a bailiff’s practice at Nemours. And 1 
guarantee your marriage with one of the Cremiere girls — the 
elder.” 

“The one who talked of the cornet-a-pistons?” cried 
Goupil. 


the mi no ret property. 


211 


“But her mother will give her thirty thousand francs,” 
said Minoret. “ You see, my boy, you were born to be a 
bailiff, just as I was made to be a postmaster, and we must all 
obey our vocation.” 

“ Very well,” said Goupil, fallen from his high hopes, 
“ h ere are the stamps ; sign me bills for twenty thousand 
francs, that I may make my bargain cash in hand.” 

Eighteen thousand francs were due to Minoret, the half- 
yearly interest on securities of which his wife knew nothing ; 
he thought he should thus be rid of Goupil, and he signed 
the bills. Goupil, seeing this huge and stupid Machiavelli 
of the Rue des Bourgeois in a fit of seignorial fever, took 
leave of him with an “ Au revoir,” and a look that would 
have made any one but a parvenu simpleton tremble as he 
looked down from a high terrace on the gardens, and the 
handsome roof of a chateau built in the style fashionable 
under Louis XIII. 

“ You will not wait for me? ” he cried to Goupil, seeing 
the clerk set out on foot. 

“You can pick me up on the road, old man,” replied the 
prospective bailiff, thirsting for vengeance, and curious to 
know the answer to the riddle presented to his mind by the 
strangely tortuous conduct of this old man. 

Ever since the day when the most infamous calumny had 
darkened her life, Ursule, a prey to one of those unaccount- 
able maladies whose seat is in the soul, was hastening to the 
grave. Excessively pale, speaking rarely a few weak, slow 
words, looking about her with a gentle, indifferent gaze, 
everything in her appearance, even her brow, showed that she 
was possessed by a consuming thought. She believed that 
the ideal crown of pure flowers, with which in every age and 
nation the brow of a maiden has been supposed to be crowned, 
had fallen from hers. In the void and silence she seemed to 
hear the slanderous remarks, the malignant comments, the 
mean laughter of the little town. The burden was too heavy 


212 


URSULE MI ROUE 7. 

for her; her innocence was too sensitive to endure such a 
stoning. She did not complain, a melancholy smile lay on 
her lips, and her eyes were constantly raised to heaven as 
though to appeal to the Lord of Angels against the injustice 
of men. 

When Goupil got back to Nemours, Ursule had been 
brought down from her room to the ground floor, leaning on 
the arm of La Bougival and of the doctor. This was in honor 
of a great event. Madame de Portenduere, having heard that 
the young girl was dying as the ermine dies, though her honor 
was less cruelly attacked than that of Clarissa Harlowe, had 
come to see her and to comfort her. The sight of her son, 
who had been talking all night of killing himself, had been 
too much for the old lady. Madame de Portenduere, indeed, 
found it quite becoming to her dignity to carry encourage- 
ment to so pure a creature, and regarded her own visit as an 
antidote to all the ill done by the gossips of the place. Her 
opinion, so much more influential, no doubt, than that of the 
vulgar, would consecrate the power of the nobility. 

This step, announced by the Abbe Chaperon, had produced 
a revulsion in Ursule which revived the hopes of the physi- 
cian, who had been in despair, and had talked of holding a 
consultation with the most eminent Paris doctors. Ursule 
had been placed in her old guardian’s armchair, and the 
character of her beauty was such that in mourning and in 
suffering she looked more lovely than at any time in her 
happy days. When Savinien came in, with his mother on 
his arm, the young invalid’s color mounted to her cheeks 
once more. 

“Do not rise, my dear,” said the old lady, in a tone of 
command. “ However ill and feeble I may be myself, I was 
determined to come and tell you what I think of all that is 
going on. I esteem you as the purest, saintliest, and sweetest 
girl in the Gatinais, and regard you as worthy to make a 
gentleman of family happy.” 


THE MIN O RET TROPERTY. 


213 


At first Ursule could make no reply; she held the withered 
hands of Savinien’s mother and kissed them, dropping tears 
upon them. 

“ Ah, madame ! ” she answered, in a weak voice, “ I should 
never have been so bold as to think of raising myself so far 
above my position if I had not been encouraged by promises, 
and my only claim was a love without limits ; but means 
have been found to separate me for ever from him whom I 
love. I have been made unworthy of him. Never!” she 
exclaimed, with a vehemence of tone that startled the listeners 
painfully — “ never will I consent to give to any man a hand 

so vilified, a reputation so tarnished ! I loved too well 

I may say it now, wreck that I am ; I love a creature almost 
as much as God. And so God ” 

“ Come, come, child, do not calumniate God. Come, my 
daughter,” said the old lady, making a great effort, “do not 
exaggerate the importance of an infamous jest which no 
one believes in. You shall live — I promise it — live and be 
happy.” 

“ You shall be happy ! ” cried Savinien, kneeling by 
Ursule, and kissing her hand. “ My mother calls you her 
daughter ! ” 

“That will do,” said the doctor, who was feeling his 
patient’s pulse. “Do not kill her with joy.” 

At this instant Goupil, who had found the gate into 
the alley ajar, pushed open the drawing-room door and 
showed his hideous face, beaming with the thoughts of 
revenge that had blossomed in his heart in the course of 
his walk. 

“ Monsieur de Portenduere,” said he, in a voice like the 
hiss of a viper at bay in its hole. 

“ What do you want?” said Savinien, rising. 

“ I want to say two words to you.” 

Savinien went out into the passage, and Goupil led him 
into the yard. 


214 


URSULE MIROUET. 


“ Swear to me by the life of Ursule whom you love, and 
by your honor as a gentleman which you prize, so to be- 
have as though there were nothing known between us of 
what I am going to tell you, and I will explain to you the 
sole cause of the persecutions turned against Mademoiselle 
Miroufe't.” 

“Can I put an end to them?” 

“Yes.” 

“Can I be revenged?” 

“Yes, on the prime mover — not on the instrument.” 

“Why?” 

“ The instrument is I am the instrument.” 

Savinien turned white. 

“I just caught sight of Ursule ” the clerk began 

again. 

“Ursule?” said Savinien, with a look at the clerk. 

“Mademoiselle Mirouet,” said Goupil, made respectful by 
Savinien’s tone; “and I would shed all my blood to undo 
what has been done. I repent. If you were to kill me 
in a duel or in any other way, of what use would my blood 
be to you? Could you drink it? At this moment it would 
poison you.” 

The man’s cool reasonableness and his own curiosity 
quelled Savinien’s boiling blood ; he glared at this hunch- 
back spoiled, with an eye that made Goupil look down. 

“And who set you on the job?” asked the young 
man. 

“ You swear? ” 

“You wish to escape unharmed?” 

“I wish that you and Mademoiselle Mirouet should forgive 
me. 

“ She will forgive you. I never will ! ” 

“Well, you will forget?” 

How terrible is the force of logic seconded by interest ! 
Two men, each longing to rend the other, were standing 


THE Ml NO RET PROPERTY. 


215 


there, close together, in a little yard, forced to speak to each 
other, united by one feeling in common. 

“ I will forgive you, but I shall not forget.” 

“ Of no use whatever,” said Goupil, coldly. 

Savinien lost patience. He dealt the clerk a slap on the 
cheek that rang through the yard ; it almost upset Goupil, and 
he himself staggered back. 

“ I have gotten no more than I deserve,” said Goupil. “ I 
have been a fool. I thought you a finer fellow than you are. 
You have taken a mean advantage of the opportunity I offered 
you. You are in my power now! ” he added, with a flash 
of hatred at Savinien. 

“ You are a murderer ! ” exclaimed Savinien. 

“No more than the knife in the assassin’s hand,” replied 
Goupil. 

“ I ask your forgiveness,” said Savinien. 

‘‘Are you sufficiently revenged ? ” said the clerk with savage 
irony. “ Will you now rest satisfied ? ” 

“Forgive and forget on both sides,” replied Savinien. 

“ Your hand on it ? ” said Goupil, holding out his. 

“ Here it is,” said Savinien, swallowing the indignity out 
of love for Ursule. “But speak: who was behind you?” 

Goupil paused, considering the two dishes of the scale, so 
to speak, with Savinien’s slap on one side, and on the other 
his hatred of Minoret. For two seconds he doubted ; then a 
voice said to him : “ You can be a notary ! ” and he replied, 
“Forgive and forget? Yes, on both sides, monsieur,” and 
he clasped Savinien’s hand. 

“Who is it, then, that is persecuting Ursule?” said Sav- 
inien. 

“Minoret. He would like to see her dead and buried. 
Why, I do not know ; but we will find out the reason. Do 
not mix me up in the matter. I can do nothing more for you 
if once I am suspected. Instead of attacking Ursule, I will 
defend her ) instead of serving Minoret, I will try to spoil his 


216 


URSULE MIROUET. 


game. I live only to ruin him, to crush him. And I will see 
him under my feet, I will dance on his dead body, I will 
make dominoes of his bones ! To-morrow, on all the walls of 
Nemours, of Fontainebleau, of Le Rouvre, the words shall 
be seen in red chalk — Minoret is a thief ! Oh, I will do it, 
by all that is holy ! I will blow him to the four winds ! 
Now, we are allies by my having peached. Well, if you like, 
1 will go on my knees to Mademoiselle Mirouet, and tell her 
that I curse the insane passion which drove me to kill her. I 
will entreat her to forgive me. That will do her good. The 
justice and the cure are there ; those two witnesses are enough ; 
but Monsieur Bongrand must pledge his word that he will not 
damage me in my career. For I have a career now,” con- 
cluded Goupil. 

“ Wait a moment,” replied Savinien, quite bewildered by 
this revelation. 

“ Ursule, my child,” said he, going back to the drawing- 
room, “ the cause of all your misery has lived to feel the 
horror of his work ; he repents, and would be glad to ask your 
pardon in the presence of these gentlemen, on condition that 
all shall be forgotten.” 

“What! Goupil?” exclaimed the cure, the justice, and 
the doctor in a breath. 

“Keep his secret,” said Ursule, putting a finger on her 
lips. 

Goupil heard her words, and saw the gesture, and it touched 
him. 

“Mademoiselle,” he said, with feeling, “I wish that all 
Nemours might hear me confess to you that a fatal passion 
turned my head, and suggested to me a series of crimes deserv- 
ing the blame of all honest folks. What I have said I will repeat 
everywhere, deploring the evil result of my practical jokes, 
though they may, in fact, have hurried on your happiness,” he 
added, a little maliciously, as he rose, “ since I see Madame 
de Portenduere here,” 


THE MI NO RET PROPERTY. 


217 


“ That is right, Goupil,” said the cure; “Mademoiselle 
forgives you. But do not forget that you have been very near 
committing murder.” 

“ Monsieur Bongrand,” Goupil went on, turning to the 
justice, “ I am going this evening to try to bargain with Le- 
coeur for his place as summonsing officer. I hope this con- 
fession will have done me no injury in your mind, and that 
you will support my candidature among the superior lawyers, 
and to the ministry.” 

The justice gravely bowed, and Goupil went off to treat 
for the better of the two appointments in Nemours. The 
others remained with Ursule, and endeavored that evening to 
restore calmness and peace in her mind, which was already 
relieved by the satisfaction given her by the clerk. 

“All Nemours shall know it,” said Bongrand. 

“ You see, my child, God was not against you,” said 
the cure. 

Minoret returned late from Le Rouvre, and dined late. 
At about nine in the evening he was sitting in his Chinese 
pavilion digesting his dinner, his wife by his side, and laying 
plans with her for Desire’s future prospects. Desire had 
quite settled down since he had held an appointment ; he 
worked steadily, and had a good chance, it was said, of suc- 
ceeding the public prosecutor of the district of Fontainebleau, 
who was to be promoted to Melun. They must find him a 
wife now, a girl wanting money, but belonging to some old 
and noble family ; then he might rise to a judgeship in Paris. 
Possibly they might be able to get him elected depute for 
Fontainebleau, where Zelie thought it would be well to settle 
for the winter, after spending the summer at Le Rouvre. 
Minoret, very much pleased with himself for having arranged 
everything for the best, had ceased to think of Ursule at the 
very moment when the drama he had so clumsily begun had 
become so fatally complicated. 


213 


URSULE MIROUET, 


“Monsieur de Portenduere would like to speak to you, 
said Cabirolle, coming in. 

“ Bring him here,” said Zelie. 

The shades of dusk prevented Madame Minoret’s seeing 
her husband suddenly turn pale ; he shuddered as he heard 
Savinien’s boots creak on the inlaid flooring of the passage, 
where the doctor’s books had formerly lined the wall. A 
vague presentiment ran like a congestive chill through the 
spoiler’s veins. 

Savinien came in. He stood still, keeping his hat on, his 
stick in his hand, his arms folded — motionless, face to face 
with the couple. 

“ I have come to know, Monsieur and Madame Minoret, 
the reasons which have led you to torture in the most infamous 
manner the young girl who is, to the knowledge of all Ne- 
mours, my future wife ; why you have tried to brand her 
honor ; why you wish her dead ; and why you have abandoned 
her to the insults of such a creature as Goupil? Answer.” 

“ What a queer notion, Monsieur Savinien,” said Zelie, 
“ to come and ask us our reasons for a thing which is to us 
inexplicable! I do not care for Ursule one snap. Since 
Uncle Minoret’s death I have no more given her a thought 
than to an old smock ! I have never breathed her name to 
Goupil — and a queer rascal he is, whom I would not trust 
with the interests of my dog. Well, Minoret, why don’t you 
answer? Are you going to let monsieur attack you and 
accuse you of rascality that is beneath you? As if a man 
who has forty-eight thousand francs a year in landed estate 
round a chateau fit for a prince would demean himself to such 
folly ! Wake up, man — sitting there like a dummy ! ” 

“ I don’t know what monsieur would be at,” said Minoret 
at last, in his thin voice, of which the clear accents betrayed 
its trembling. “ What reason could I have for persecuting 
the girl ? I may have said to Goupil that it vexed me to 
know that she was in Nemours j my son Desire had taken a, 


THE MIN O RET PROPERTY. 


219 


fancy to her, and I would not have him marry her, that 
was all.” 

“ Goupil has confessed everything, Monsieur Minoret.” 

There was a moment’s silence — a terrible moment, while 
these three persons watched each other. Zelie had detected 
a nervous movement in the broad face of her colossus. 

“Though you are but vermin, I intend to be publicly re- 
venged on you,” the young nobleman went on. “ I shall not 
ask satisfaction from you, a man of sixty-seven, for the insults 
heaped on Mademoiselle Mirouet ; but from your son. The 
first time Monsieur Minoret, junior, sets foot in Nemours, we 
meet. He will have to fight me, and he shall fight ! Or he 
shall be so utterly disgraced that he will not dare to show his 
face anywhere ; if he does not come to Nemours, I will go to 
Fontainebleau ! I will have satisfaction. It shall never be 
said that you have basely tried to bring shame on a defense- 
less girl.” 

“ But the calumnies of such a fellow as Goupil — really — - 
are not ” said Minoret. 

“Would you like me to confront you with him?” cried 
Savinien, interrupting him. “ Believe me, you had better 
not noise the matter ; it is between you and Goupil and me ; 
leave it so, and God will decide the issue in the duel to which 
I shall do your son the honor of challenging him.” 

“ But things cannot go on like that ! ” cried Zelie. “ What? 
Do you suppose that I shall allow Desire to fight with you, a 
naval officer, whose business it is to use the sword and pistol ? 
If you have a score against Minoret, here is Minoret ; take 
Minoret, fight with Minoret ! But why should my boy, who. 
by your own confession, is innocent of it all, suffer the penalty? 
I will set a dog of mine to hinder that, my fine gentleman ! 
Come, Minoret, there you sit gaping like a great idiot ! You 
are in your own house, and you allow this young fellow to 
keep his hat on in your wife’s presence ! Now, young man, 
to begin with, take yourself off. Every man’s house is his 

U 


220 


URSULE MIROUET. 


castle. I do not know what you are at with all your rhodo- 
montade, but just turn on your heel ; and if you lay a finger 
on Desire, you will have me to settle with — you and your 
precious slut, Ursule.” 

She rang violently, and called the servants. 

“Remember what I have said,” repeated Savinien, who, 
heedless of Zelie’s diatribe, went away, leaving this sword of 
Damocles suspended over their heads. 

“ Now, Minoret, will you tell me the meaning of all this? ” 
said Zelie to her husband. “A young man does not come 
into a decent house and kick up all this tremendous dust for 
nothing, and insist on the blood of an only son and heir.” 

“ It is some trick of that nasty ape, Goupil ; I had prom- 
ised to help him to be made notary if he would get Le Rouvre 
on reasonable terms. I gave him ten per cent., twenty thou- 
sand francs, in bills of exchange, and I suppose he is not sat- 
isfied.” 

“ Yes; but what previous reason can he have had to get up 
serenades and rascalities to trouble Ursule ? ” 

“ He wanted to marry her.” 

“ A girl without a sou ? He ? Fiddlesticks ! Look here, 
Minoret, you are cramming me with nonsense, and you are 
by nature too stupid to make it take, my man. There is some- 
thing behind it all, and you must tell it me.” 

“ There is nothing.” 

“ There is nothing ? Well, I tell you that is a lie, and we 
shall see.” 

“ Will you leave me in peace ? ” 

“ I will turn on the tap of that barrel of poison, Goupil, 
whom you know, I think ; and you will not get the best of 
the bargain then.” 

“ As you please.” 

“ Certainly, it will be as I please ! And what I please, first 
and foremost, is that no one shall lay a finger on Desire ; 
if anything happens to him — there, I tell you, I should do 


THE MI NO RET PROPERTY. 


221 


something that would take me to the block. Desire ! Why ! 
And there you sit without stirring ! ” 

A quarrel thus begun between Minoret and his wife was not 
likely to end without long domestic broils. The thieving 
fool now found his struggle with himself and Ursule made 
harder by his blundering, and complicated by a fresh and 
terrible adversary. Next day, when he went out to go to 
Goupil, hoping to silence him with money, he read on all the 
walls : Minoret is a thief ! Every one he met pitied him, and 
asked him who was at the bottom of this anonymous placard- 
ing, and every one overlooked the evasiveness of his replies 
by ascribing it to his stupidity. Simpletons gain more ad- 
vantages from their weakness than clever men get from their 
strength. We look on at a great man struggling against fate, 
but we raise a fund for a bankrupt grocer. Do you know 
why? We feel superior when we protect an idiot, and are 
aggrieved at being no more than equal to the man of genius. 
A clever man would have been ruined if, like Minoret, he had 
stammered out preposterous replies with a scared look. Zelie 
and the servants effaced the libelous inscription wherever 
they saw it ; but it weighed on Minoret’s conscience. 

Though Goupil had, only the day before, given the sum- 
monsing officer his word, he most audaciously refused now to 
sign the agreement. 

“ My dear Lecceur, you see I am in a position to buy 
Dionis’ practice, and I can help you to sell yours to some one 
else. Put your agreement in your pocket again. It is the 
loss only of a couple of stamps. Here are seventy centimes." 

Lecceur was too much afraid of Goupil to make any com- 
plaints. All Nemours was forthwith informed that Minoret 
had offered his guarantee to Dionis to enable Goupil to pur- 
chase his place. The budding notary wrote to Savinien re- 
tracting all his confession regarding Minoret, and explaining 
to the young nobleman that his new position, the decisions of 
the supreme court, and his respect for justice forbade his 


222 


URSULE MI ROUE T. 


fighting a duel. At the same time, he warned him to take 
care henceforth how he behaved, as he — Goupil — was prac- 
ticed in kicking, and at the first provocation would have the 
pleasure of breaking his leg. 

The walls of Nemours spoke no more. But the quarrel 
between Minoret and his wife continued, and Savinien kept 
angry silence. Within ten days of these events the marriage 
of the elder Mademoiselle Massin to the future notary was 
publicly rumored. Mademoiselle Massin had eighty thou» 
sand francs and her ugly face ; Goupil, his misshapen body 
and his appointment ; so the union seemed suitable and prob- 
able. 

At midnight, as Goupil was quitting the Massins’ house, he 
was seized in the street by two strangers, who thrashed him 
soundly and disappeared. Goupil never breathed a word 
about this nocturnal scene, and gave the lie to an old woman 
who, looking out of her window, fancied she had recognized 
him. 

All these great little events were watched by the justice, 
who clearly saw that Goupil had some mysterious power over 
Minoret, and promised himself that he would find out the 
reason of it. 

Though public opinion in the little town acknowledged 
Ursule’s perfect innocence, she recovered but slowly. In this 
state of physical prostration, which left her soul and mind 
free, she became the passive medium of certain phenomena of 
which the effects indeed were terrible, and of a nature to 
attract the attention of science, if science had only been 
taken into the secret. Ten days after Madame de Porten- 
duere’s visit, Ursule had a dream which presented the charac- 
teristics of a supernatural vision, as much in its moral facts 
as in its physical conditions, so to speak. 

Her godfather, old Doctor Minoret, appeared to her, and 
signed to her to follow him ; she dressed and went with him, 


THE MI NO RET PROPERTY. 


223 


through the darkness, as far as the house in the Rue des Bour- 
geois, where she found everything, to the most trivial details, 
just as they had been at the time of her godfather’s death. 
The old man wore the clothes he had had on the day before 
he died; his face was pale, not a sound was heard as he 
moved ; nevertheless, Ursule distinctly heard his voice, though 
it was faint, as if repeated by a distant echo. The doctor 
led his ward into the Chinese pavilion, where he made her 
raise the marble top of the little Boule chiffonier, as she had 
done the day of his death ; but instead of finding nothing 
there, she saw the letter her godfather had desired her to fetch. 
She unsealed it and read it, as well as the will in Savinien’s 
favor. 

“ The letters of the writing,” she said to the cure, “shone 
as though they had been traced with sunbeams ; they scorched 
my eyes.” 

When she looked up at her uncle to thank him, she saw a 
kindly smile on his pale lips. Then, in his weak but quite 
clear voice, the spectre showed her Minoret in the passage 
listening to his secret, unscrewing the lock, and taking the 
packet of papers. Then, with his right hand, he took hold 
of the girl and obliged her to walk with the tread of the dead 
to follow Minoret home to his house. Ursule crossed the 
town, went into the posting-house, and up to Zelie’s room, 
where the spectre made her see the spoiler unsealing the 
letters, reading and burning them. 

“ He could only make the third match burn,” said Ursule, 
“ to set light to the papers, and he buried the ashes among 
the cinders. After that, my godfather took me back to our 
house, and I saw Monsieur Minoret-Levrault steal into the 
library, where he took out of the third volume of the ‘Pandects’ 
the three bonds bearing twelve thousand francs a year, as well 
as the money saved in the house, all in bank-notes. Then 
my guardian said to me: ‘All the torments that have brought 
you to the brink of the grave are his work, but God wills that 


224 


URSULE MIROUET. 

you shall be happy. You will not die yet ; you will marry 
Savinien. If you love me, if you love Savinien, you will ask 
for the restoration of your fortune by my nephew. Swear 
that you will.’ ” 

Shining like the Lord at His Transfiguration, the spectre 
had had such a violent effect on Ursule’s mind, in the 
oppressed state in which she was at the time, that she prom- 
ised all her uncle asked her to be rid of the nightmare. She 
woke to find herself standing in the middle of her room, in 
front of the portrait of her godfather, which she had had 
brought there when she was ill. She went to bed again, and 
to sleep after great excitement, remembering this strange 
vision when she woke; but she dared not speak of it. Her 
refined good sense, and her delicacy of feeling, took offense 
at the thought of revealing a dream of which the cause and 
object were her own pecuniary interests ; she naturally attrib- 
uted it to La Bougival’s chat, as she was going to sleep, of the 
doctor’s liberality, and the convictions her old nurse still 
cherished on the subject. 

But the dream returned with aggravated details, which made 
her dread it greatly. The second time her godfather laid his 
ice-cold hand on her shoulder, causing her the acutest pain, 
an indescribable sensation. “The dead must be obeyed ! ” 
he said in sepulchral tones. 

“And tears,” she added, “fell from his hollow blank 
eyes.” 

The third time the dead man took her by her long plaits 
of hair, and showed her Minoret talking with Goupil, and 
promising him money if he would take Ursule to Sens. Then 
she made up her mind to tell her three dreams to the Abbe 
Chaperon. 

“Monsieur le Cure,” she said to him one evening, “do 
you believe that the dead can walk ? ” 

“ My child, sacred history, profane history, modern history 
bear witness in many passages to their appearing. Still, the 


THE MIN ORE T PROPERTY. 


225 


church has never made it an article of faith ; and as to 
science, in France it laughs it to scorn.’ ’ 

“ What do you believe? ” 

“ The power of God, my child, is infinite.” 

“Did my godfather ever speak to you of these things?” 

“Yes; often. He had completely changed his views of 
such matters. His conversion dated from the day, as he told 
me twenty times, when a woman at Paris heard you, at Ne- 
mours, praying for him, and saw the red dot you had made 
on the calendar at the name of Saint Savinien.” 

Ursule gave a scream that made the priest shudder ; she 
remembered the scene when, on his return from Paris, her 
guardian had read her heart, and had taken away her calendar. 

“If that is the case,” said she, “my visions are possible. 
My godfather has appeared to me as Jesus appeared to His 
disciples. He stands in a golden light, and he speaks to me. 
I wanted to beg you to say a mass for the repose of his soul, 
and to beseech the interposition of God to stop these appari- 
tions which overwhelm me.” 

She then related her three dreams in every detail, insisting 
on the absolute truthfulness of the facts, the freedom of her 
own movements, and the clear vision of an inner self which, 
as she described it, followed the guidance of her uncle’s 
spectre with perfect ease. What most surprised the priest, to 
whom Ursule’s perfect veracity was well known, was her exact 
description of the room formerly occupied by Zelie Minoret at 
the posting-house, into which Ursule had never been, and 
which, indeed, she had never even heard mentioned. 

“ By what means can these strange apparitions be pro- 
duced? ” said Ursule. “ What did my godfather think ? ” 

“Your godfather, my child, argued from hypotheses. He 
acknowledged the possible existence of a spiritual world, a 
world of ideas. If ideas are a creation proper to man, if they 
subsist, and live a life peculiar to themselves, they must have 
forms imperceptible to our external senses, but perceptible to 
15 


22b 


URSULA M1R0UET. 


our interior senses under certain conditions. Thus your god- 
father’s ideas may enwrap you, and you perhaps have lent 
them his aspect. Then, if Minoret has committed these ac- 
tions, they are dissolved into ideas ; for every action Is the 
outcome of several ideas. Now, if ideas have their being in 
the spiritual world, your spirit may have been enabled to see 
them when transported thither. These phenomena are not 
more strange than those of memory ; and those of memory 
are as surprising and as inexplicable as those of the perfume 
of plants, which are perhaps the plants’ ideas.” 

“ Dear me ! how you expand the world ! But is it really 
possible to hear a dead man speak, to see him walk and act ?” 

“Swedenborg, in Sweden,” replied the abbe, “has proved 
to demonstration that he held intercourse with the dead. 
But, at any rate, come into the library, and in the life of the 
famous Due de Montmorency, who was beheaded at Toulouse, 
and who certainly was not the man to invent a cock-and-bull 
story, you will read of an adventure almost like your own, 
which also occurred, above a hundred years before, to 
Cardan.” 

Ursule and the cure went up to the second floor, and the good 
man found for her a little duodecimo edition, printed in Paris 
in 1666, of the “ History of Henri de Montmorency,” written 
by a contemporary priest who had known that prince. 

“Read,” said the cure, giving her the volume open at 
pages 175 and 176. “ Your godfather often read this passage ; 
see, here are some grains of his snuff.” 

“And he is no more !” said Ursule, taking the book to 
read this passage : 

“The siege of Privas was remarkable for the loss of some 
of the persons in command. Two colonels were killed, to 
wit : the Marquis d’Uxelles, who died of a wound received in 
the trenches, and the Marquis de Portes, by a gunshot in the 
head. Pie was to have been made a marshal of France the 
very day he was killed. Just about the moment when the 


THE MI NO RET PROPERTY. 


227 


Marquis died, the Due de Montmorency, who was sleeping in 
his tent, was roused by a voice like that of the Marquis, bid- 
ding him farewell. The love he had for one who was so dear 
to him caused him to attribute the illusion of this dream to 
the power of his imagination ; and the toil of the night, which 
he had spent as usual in the trenches, made him go to sleep 
again without any fear. But the same voice suddenly broke 
it again ; and the phantom, which he had only seen in his 
sleep, compelled him to wake once more, and to hear dis- 
tinctly the same words that it had spoken before disappearing. 
The Due then recollected that one day when they had heard 
Pitrat the philosopher discoursing of the separation of the soul 
from the body, they had promised to bid each other farewell, 
whichever died first, if he were permitted. Whereupon, un- 
able to hinder his dread of the truth of this warning, he at 
once sent one of his servants to the Marquis’ lodgings, which 
were distant from his own. But before his man could return 
he was sent for by the King, who caused him to be told, by 
persons who could comfort him, of the misfortune he had 
already apprehended. 

“ I leave it to the learned to discuss the cause of this event, 
which I have often heard the Due de Montmorency relate, 
and which I have thought worthy to be set down for its mar- 
velousness and its truth.” 

“ But, then,” asked Ursule, “ what ought I to do ? ” 

“ My child,” said the cure, “ the case is so serious, and so 
much to your own advantage, that you must keep complete 
silence. Now that you have trusted me with the secret of 
this apparition, perhaps it will come no more. Besides, you 
are strong enough now to go to church ; well, then, to-mor- 
row you can come to thank God, and to pray for the peace 
of your godfather’s soul. Be quite sure, at any rate, that 
your secret is in safe hands.” 

“ If you could know in what terror I go to sleep ! What 
awful looks my godfather gives me ! The last time he held 


228 


UR SUL E MIROUET. 


on to my dress to see me longer. I woke with my face 
streaming with tears.” 

“ Rest in peace ; he will come no more,” said the cur6. 

Without losing any time the Abbe Chaperon went to Min- 
oret’s house and begged him to grant him a minute’s conver- 
sation in the Chinese pavilion, insisting that they must be 
alone. 

“ No one can hear us ? ” asked the priest. 

“ No one,” said Minoret. 

“ Monsieur, my character is known to you,” said the worthy 
priest, looking Minoret mildly but steadfastly in the face. “I 
must speak to you of some serious, extraordinary matters, 
which concern you alone, and which you may rely on me to 
keep a profound secret ; but it is impossible that I should not 
reveal them to you. When your uncle was alive, there stood 

just there ” said the abbe, pointing to the spot, “a little 

chiffonier of Boule with a marble top ” (Minoret turned pale), 
“ and under the marble slab your uncle placed a letter for his 
ward ’ ’ 

The cure went on to tell Minoret the whole story of Min- 
oret’s conduct, without omitting the smallest detail. The 
retired postmaster, when he heard of the circumstance of the 
two matches that went out before burning up, felt his hair 
creep on his thick-set scalp. 

“Who has invented such a cock-and-bull story?” he said 
in a husky voice, when the tale was finished. 

“The dead man himself! ” 

This reply made Minoret shiver slightly, for he too saw the 
doctor in his dreams. 

“ God is most good to work miracles for me, Monsieur le 
Cure,” said Minoret, inspired by his peril to utter the only 
jest he ever perpetrated in his life. 

“All that God does is natural,” replied the priest. 

“Your phantasmagoria does not frighten me,” said the 
colossus, recovering his presence of mind a little. 


THE MIN 0 RET PROPERTY. 


229 


“ 1 have not come to frighten you, my dear sir, for I shall 
never speak of this to any living creature,” said the cure. 

“ You alone know the truth. It is a matter between you and 
God.” 

Come, now, Monsieur le Cure, do you believe me capa- 
ble of such a breach of faith ? ” 

“1 believe in no crimes but those which are confessed to 
me, and ot which the sinner repents,” said the priest in apos- 
tolic tones. 

“ A crime? ” exclaimed Minoret. 

“ A crime, terrible in its results.” 

‘ ‘ In what way ? ” 

“ I 11 the fact that it evades human justice. The crimes 
which are not expiated here will be expiated in the other 
world. God Himself avenges the innocent.” 

“ You think that God troubles Himself about such mere 
trifles?” 

“ II He could not see all the worlds and every detail at a 
glance, as you hold a landscape in your eye, He would not be 
God.” 

“ Monsieur le Cure, do you give me your word of honor 
that you have heard all this story from no one but my 
uncle ? ” 

“Your uncle has now appeared three times to Ursule, to 
reiterate it. Worn out by these dreams, she confided these 
revelations to me, under the seal of secrecy ; she herself 
regards them as so entirely irrational that she will never allude 
to them. So on that point you may be quite easy.” 

“But I am quite easy on all points, Monsieur Chaperon.” 

“I can but hope so,” said the old priest. “Even if I 
should regard such warnings given in dreams as utterly 
absurd, I should still think it necessary to communicate them 
to you on account of the singularity of the details. You are 
a respectable man ; and you have earned your fine fortune too 
legitimately to wish to add to it by robbery. You are, too, a 


230 


URSULE MIROUET. 


very simple man ; remorse would torture you too cruelly. 
We have in ourselves an instinct of justice, in the civilized 
man as in the savage, which does not allow of our enjoying 
in peace anything we have acquired dishonestly according to 
the laws of the society we live in ; for well-organizad com- 
munities are modeled on the plan given to the universe by 
God Himself. In so far, society has a divine origin. Man 
does not evolve ideas, does not invent forms; he imitates the 
eternal relations he finds in all that surrounds him. Conse- 
quently, this is what happens : no criminal going to the 
scaffold with the full power of carrying out of the world the 
secret of his crimes, allows himself to be executed without 
making the confession to which he is urged by a mysterious 
impulse. So, my dear Monsieur Minoret, if you are easy I 
may go away happy.” 

Minoret was so dazed that he left the cure to let himself 
out. As soon as he was alone he flew into the rage of a full- 
blooded nature ; he broke out in the wildest blasphemies, and 
called Ursule by every odious name. 

“Why, what has that little wench done to you?” asked 
Madame Minoret, who had come in on tiptoe after seeing the 
cure depart. 

For the first and only time in his life, Minoret, drunk with 
fury and driven to extremities by his wife's persistent ques- 
tioning, beat her so soundly that when she fell helpless he 
was obliged to lift her in his arms, and, very much ashamed 
of himself, to put her to bed. 

He himself had a short fit of illness ; the doctor was 
obliged to bleed him twice. When he was about again, 
every one, within a short time, noticed that he was altered. 
Minoret would take walks alone, and often wander about the 
streets like a man uneasy in his mind. He seemed absent- 
minded when spoken to — he, who had never had two ideas 
in his head. At last, one day, he addressed the justice, in 
the High Street, as he was going, no doubt, to fetch Ursule 


THE MIN O RET PROPERTY, 


231 


to take her to Madame de Portenduere’s, where the whist 
parties had begun again. 

“ Monsieur Bongrand, I have something rather important 
to say to my cousin Ursule,” said he, taking the justice by 
the arm, “and I am glad that you should be present; you 
may give her some advice.” 

They found Ursule at the piano ; she rose with an air of 
cold dignity when she saw Minoret. 

“ Monsieur Minoret wishes to speak with you on business, 
my dear,” said the justice. “ By the way, do not forget to 
give me your dividend warrants. I am going to Paris, and I 
will get your six months’ interest, and La Bougival’s.” 

“Cousin,” said Minoret, “ our uncle had accustomed you 
to an easier life than you now enjoy.” 

“It is possible to be very happy without much money,” 
said she. 

“ I have been thinking that money would help to make you 
happy,” replied Minoret, “and I came to offer you some, out 
of respect for my uncle’s memory.” 

“ You had a very natural course open to show your respect for 
him,” said Ursule severely. “You might have left his house 
just as it was, and have sold it to me, for you ran the price 
up so high only in the hope of finding treasure hoarded 
there ” 

“At any rate,” said Minoret, evidently ill at ease, “ if you 
had twelve thousand francs a year, you would be in a position 
to marry the better.” 

“ I have not such an income.” 

“ But if I were to give it to you, on condition of your pur- 
chasing an estate in Brittany, in Madame de Portenduere’s 
part of the country, she would then consent to your marrying 
her son ? ” 

“ Monsieur Minoret, I have no right to so large a sum, and 
could not possibly accept it from you. We are scarcely 
related, and still less are we friends. I have suffered too 


232 


URSULE MIROUET. 


much already from slander to wish to give any cause for evil 
speaking. What have I done to deserve such a gift? On 
what pretext could you make me such a present ? These 
questions, which I have a right to ask you, every one will 
answer in his own way. It will be interpreted as compensa- 
tion for some injury, and I decline to recognize any. Your 
uncle did not bring me up in ignoble sentiments. We can 
accept gifts only from a friend. I could not feel any affec- 
tion for you, and should necessarily prove ungrateful, so I do 
not choose to run the risk of such ingratitude.” 

“You refuse! ” exclaimed the colossus; the idea of any- 
body refusing a fortune would never have entered his head. 

“ I refuse,” repeated Ursule. 

“But on what grounds have you any claim to offer such a 
fortune to mademoiselle?” asked the old lawyer. “You 
have an idea ; have you an idea? ” 

“ Well, yes ; the idea of getting her away from Nemours, 
that my son may leave me in peace ; he is in love with her, 
and insists on marrying her.” 

“ Well, we will see about that,” replied the justice, settling 
his spectacles. “ Give us time to reflect.” 

He escorted Minoret home, quite approving his anxiety as 
to the future on Desire’s account, gently blaming Ursule’s 
hasty decisiveness, and promising to make her listen to reason. 
As soon as Minoret was within doors, Bongrand went to the 
posting stables, borrowed a horse and gig, and hurried off to 
Fontainebleau, where he inquired for D6sir6, and was in- 
formed that he was at an evening party at the sous-prefet’s. 
The justice, quite delighted, went on thither. Desire was 
playing a rubber with the public prosecutor’s wife, the wife of 
the sous-prefet, and the colonel of the regiment stationed 
there. 

“I have come the bearer of good news,” said Monsieur 
Bongrand to D6sir6. “ You are in love with Ursule Mirouet, 
and your father no longer objects to the marriage.” 


THE MI NO RET PROPERTY. 


233 


“ Ursule Mirouet ! I am in love with her? ” cried Desire, 
laughing. “ What put Ursule Mirouet into your head? I 
remember seeing her occasionally at old Doctor Minoret’s, 
my great grand-uncle, a little girl who is certainly lovely ; but 
she is outrageously pious ; and if I, like everybody else, did 
justice to her charms, I never troubled my head with caring 
for her washed-out complexion,” and he smiled at the lady of 
the house — a “sprightly brunette,” to use a last-century 
phrase. “Where were you dug up, my dear Monsieur Bon- 
grand ? All the world knows that my father is sovereign lord 
over lands worth forty-eight thousand francs a year, lying 
round his Chateau du Rouvre, so all the world knows that I 
have forty-eight thousand perpetual and funded reasons for 
not caring for the ward of the law. If I were to marry a 
mere nobody, these ladies would think me a great fool.” 

“You have never teased your father about Ursule ? ” 

“ Never.” 

“You hear him, monsieur,” said the justice to the lawyer, 
who had been listening, and whom he now buttonholed in a 
corner, where they stood talking for about a quarter of an 
hour. 

An hour later the justice, having returned to Nemours and 
to Ursule’s house, sent La Bougival to fetch Minoret, who 
came at once. 

“Mademoiselle ” said Bongrand, as Minoret came in. 

“Accepts? ” Minoret put in, interrupting him. 

“ No, not yet,” replied the justice, settling his spectacles. 
“ She had some scruples regarding your son’s condition, for 
she had been very much ill-used on the score of a similar 
passion, and knows the value of peace and quiet. Can you 
swear to her that your son is crazed with love, and that you 
have no object in view but that of preserving our dear Ursule 
from some fresh Goupilleries ? ” 

“ Oh yes, I swear it! ” said Minoret. 

“ Stop a minute, Master Minoret ! ” said the justice, taking 


234 


UR SUL E MIROUET. 


one of his hands out of his trousers-pocket to slap Minoret on 
the back, making him start. “Do not so lightly commit 
perjury.” 

“ Perjury ! ” 

“ It lies between you and your son, who, at Fontainebleau, 
at the sub-prefect's house, and in the presence of four persons 
and the public prosecutor of the district, has just sworn that 
he never once thought of his cousin Ursule Mirouet. You 
must therefore have had other reasons for offering her such an 
immense sum? I perceived that you were making very rash 
statements, and I have been to Fontainebleau myself.” 

Minoret stood aghast at his own blunder. 

“ Still, there is no harm, Monsieur Bongrand, in offering 
to a young relative what will facilitate a marriage, which, as 
it would seem, will make her happy, and in seeking some 
excuse to overcome her modesty.” 

Minoret, who in his extremity had hit on an almost admis- 
sible plea, wiped his brow, wet with large drops of sweat. 

“ You know my motives for refusing,” replied Ursule. “ I 
can but beg you to come here no more. Monsieur de Por- 
tenduere has not told me his reasons, but he has a feeling of 
contempt, even of hatred, of you, which forbids me to receive 
you. My happiness is my whole fortune ; I do not blush to 
own it ; and I will do nothing to compromise it, for Monsieur 
de Portendudre is waiting only till I am of age to marry me.” 

“ The proverb, ‘ Money is all-powerful,’ is very false ! ” 
said the huge, burly Minoret, looking at the justice, whose 
observant eyes disturbed him greatly. 

* He rose and went away ; but he found the air outside as 
oppressive as that in the little sitting-room. 

“I must somehow put an end to this ! ” said he to himself 
as he got home. 

“ Now, your dividend warrant, my child,” said the justice, 
a good deal surprised at Ursule’s calmness after so strange a 
scene. 


THE MIN O RET PROPERTY. 


235 


When she returned with her own warrant and La Bougival’s, 
Ursule found the justice walking up and down the room. 

“You have no idea what could have led to that huge lout’s 
offer? ’’ he asked her. 

“ None that I can tell you,” she replied. 

Monsieur Bongrand looked at her in surprise — 

“Then we both have the same notion,” he said. “Here, 
make a note of the numbers of the two warrants, in case I 
should lose them; that is always a necessary precaution.” 
Bongrand himself noted on a card the numbers of the war- 
rants. 

“ Good-by, my child ; I shall be away two days, but I 
shall be back on the third for my sitting.” 

That night Ursule had a vision of a very strange character. 
It seemed to her that her bed was in the graveyard of Ne- 
mours, and that her uncle’s grave was at the foot of the bed. 
The white stone on which she read the epitaph dazzled her 
eyes, and opened endways like the front cover of an album. 
She shrieked loudly, but the figure of the doctor slowly sat 
up. She first saw his yellow head and white hair, that shone 
as if surrounded by a halo. Under his bald forehead his eyes 
glittered like beams of light, and he rose as if drawn up by 
some superior force. Ursule trembled horribly in her bodily 
frame ; her flesh felt like a burning garment ; and, as she sub- 
sequently described it, there seemed to be another self mov- 
ing within it. 

“ Mercy, godfather ! ” she cried. 

“ Mercy? It is too late,” he answered in the voice of the 
dead, to use the poor girl’s inexplicable expression when she 
related this fresh dream to the Abbe Chaperon. “ He has 
been warned. He has paid no heed to the warning. His 
son’s days arc numbered. If he does not ere long confess 
all and make full restitution, he will mourn his son, who is to 
perish by a horrible and violent death. Tell him this ! ” The 


236 


URSULE MIROUET. 

spectre pointed to a row of figures, which flashed on the wall 
as if they had been written with fire, and said : “ That is his 
sentence ! ” 

When her uncle had lain down in the grave again, Ursule 
heard the noise of the stone falling into place, and then, far 
away, a strange noise as of tramping horses, and men loudly 
shouting. 

Next day Ursule was prostrate. She could not get up, this 
dream had so overwrought her. She begged her old nurse to 
go at once to the Abbe Chaperon and bring him back with 
her. The good man came as soon as he had performed mass ; 
but he was not at all astonished by Ursule’s dream. He was 
convinced of the fact of the robbery, and no longer sought any 
explanation of the abnormal state of his “little dreamer.” 
He left Ursule, and went straight to Minoret. 

“Dear me, Monsieur le Cur6,” said Zelie, “ my husband’s 
temper is so spoilt, I don’t know what is the matter with him. 
Until lately, he was a perfect child ; but these two months 
past I hardly know him. That he should have gotten into such 
a rage as to strike me — me, when I am so gentle ! The man 
must be completely and utterly altered. You will find him 
among the rocks ; he spends his life there. What does he do 
there?” 

In spite of the heat — it was September, 1836 — the priest 
crossed the canal, and turned up a pathway, where he saw 
Minoret sitting under a boulder. 

“You are in some great trouble, Monsieur Minoret,” said 
the priest, appearing before the guilty man. “ You belong to 
me, you know, for you are unhappy. Unfortunately, I have 
come to add, perhaps, to your apprehensions. Ursule has 
just had a terrible dream. Your uncle lifted up his grave- 
stone to prophesy misfortune to your family. I have not 
come to frighten you, believe me, but you ought to be told 
what he said ” 

“ Really, Monsieur le Cure, I cannot be left in peace any- 










‘you stole the three certificates. 




THE MINORET PROPERTY. 


237 


where, not even in this wilderness. I want to know nothing 
of what goes on in the next world,” dejectedly replied the 
miserable old man. 

” I will leave you, monsieur. I have not taken this walk 
in the heat for my own pleasure,” said the priest, wiping his 
brow. 

“Well, then, what was it the old fellow said?” asked 
Minoret. 

“You are threatened with the loss of your son. If your 
uncle could tell things which you alone knew, you must 
tremble at the things which we none of us know. Restitu- 
tion, my dear sir, restitution ! Do not lose your soul for a 
little gold.” 

“Restitution of what?” 

“ Of the fortune the doctor intended for Ursule. You 
^tole the three certificates ; I now know it. You began by 
persecuting the poor girl, and you now end by offering her a 
dowry ; you have fallen so low as lying ; you are entangled 
in its mazes, and make a false step at every turn. You are 
yourself clumsy, and you have been badly served by your 
accomplice, Goupil, who only laughs at you. Make haste, for 
you are being watched by clever and clear-sighted persons, 
Ursule’s friends. Restitution ! And even if you do not save 
your son, who may not be in any danger, you will save your 
own soul, and your honor. In a society constituted as ours 
is, in a little town where you all have your eyes on each other, 
and where what is not known is surely guessed, can you hope 
to hide an ill-gotten fortune ? Come, my son, an innocent 
man would not have allowed me to say so much ? ” 

“ Go to the devil ! ” cried Minoret. “ I do not know what 
you are all at, setting on me. I like these stones better, for 
they leave me in peace.” 

“ Good-by. You have been warned by me, my dear sir, 
without a soul in the world having heard a single word about 
the matter, either from me or from that poor girl. But 


238 


URSULE MIROUET. 


beware ! There is a man who has his eye on you. God have 
mercy on you ! ” 

The cure turned and left him. When he had gone a few 
steps, he looked back once more at Minoret. He was sitting 
with his head between his hands, for his head ached. Minoret 
was a little mad. 

In the first place, he had kept the three certificates ; he did 
not know what to do with them \ he dared not present them 
himself ; he was afraid lest he should be recognized ; he did 
not wish to sell them, and was trying to hit on some way of 
transferring them. His day dreams were romances of busi- 
ness, of which the climax always was the transfer of those 
cursed certificates. In this dreadful predicament he thought, 
however, of confessing to his wife, so as to have some advice. 
Zelie, who had steered her own ship so well, would know how 
to get him out of this scrape. 

Three per cents, were now quoted at eighty ; thus, with 
arrears, the restitution in question would amount to nearly a 
million francs. Give up a million, without any proof against 
him that he had taken them ! This was no joke. And during 
the whole of September and part of October Minoret remained 
a prey to remorse and irresolution. To the amazement of the 
whole town, he grew thinner. 

A fearful circumstance hastened the imparting of his secret 
to Zelie ; the sword of Damocles swayed over their heads. 
Towards the middle of October Monsieur and Madame Min- 
oret received the following letter from their son Desire : 

“My dear Mother : — If I have not been to see you since 
the vacation, it is because, in the first place, I have been on 
duty in the absence of my chief, and also because I knew that 
Monsieur de Portenduere only awaited my going to Nemours 
to pick a quarrel with me. Tired, perhaps, of the long post- 
ponement of the revenge he is anxious to take on our family, 
the Vicomte has been to Fontainebleau, where he appointed 


THE MI NO RET PROPERTY. 


239 


to meet one of his friends from Paris, after making sure of 

the assistance of the Vicomte de Soulanges, brigadier of the 

hussars quartered here. 

# 

“ He called on me very politely, accompanied by these two 
gentlemen, and told me that my father was undoubtedly the 
originator of the infamous persecution directed against Ursule 
Mirouet, his future wife ; he gave me proof by telling me that 
Goupil had confessed before witnesses, and by giving me an 
account of my father’s conduct ; he, it seems, after refusing 
at first to carry out his promises to Goupil as the price of his 
villainous devices, found the necessary funds for acquiring 
the place of summonsing officer at Nemours, and, finally, out 
of fear, stood surety to Monsieur Dionis for the purchase of 
his practice, and so disposed of Goupil. The Vicomte, who 
cannot fight a man of sixty-seven, and who insists on aveng- 
ing the insults heaped on Ursule, formally asked satisfaction 
of me. His purpose, thought out and determined on in 
silence, was not to be altered. If I should refuse to fight, he 
meant to meet me in a drawing-room in the presence of those 
persons whose opinion I most value, and there to insult me so 
grossly that either I must fight or my hopes in life be at an 
end. In France a coward is universally contemned. More- 
over, his motives for demanding such reparation would be 
laid before me by gentlemen of honor. 

“ He was sorry, he said, to be driven to such extremities. 
In the opinion of his seconds, the wisest thing I could do 
would be to arrange a meeting, as men of honor are in the 
habit of doing, in such a way that Ursule’s name should not 
appear in the matter. Finally, to avoid all scandal in France, 
we could, with our seconds, cross the frontier at the nearest 
point. Thus everything would be arranged for the best. 
His name, he said, was worth ten times my fortune, and his 
prospects of happiness were a greater stake for him to risk 
than anything I could risk in this duel, which is to be fatal. 
He desired me to choose seconds and settle the matter. My 


240 


URSULE MIROUET. 


seconds met his yesterday, and they unanimously decided 
that I owe him this reparation. 

“ In a week I set out for Geneva with two of my friends. 
Monsieur de Portenduere, Monsieur de Soulanges, and Mon- 
sieur de Trailles will go their own way. We fight with 
pistols ; all the details are arranged. Each is to fire three 
shots, and then, whatever may have come of it, the matter is 
at an end. To avoid all talk of such a dirty business — for I 
cannot possibly justify my father’s conduct — I am writing to 
you only at the last minute. I will not go to see you on 
account of the violence you might display, which would be 
quite out of place. To make my way in the world I must 
obey its laws ; and where a Vicomte finds ten reasons for a 
duel, the son of a postmaster must have a hundred. I shall 
pass through Nemours at night, and will there bid you good- 
by.” 

When they had read this letter, there was a scene between 
Zelie and Minoret, which ended in his confessing the theft, 
with all the circumstances connected with it, and the strange 
scenes to which it had everywhere given rise, even in the 
realm of dreams. The million had the same fascination for 
Zelie as it had for Minoret, and she did not propose to let it 
give her any uneasiness. 

“ Do you stay quietly here,” said Zelie, without the smallest 
reproach to her husband for his blundering; “ I will take the 
matter in hand. We will keep the money, and Desire shall 
not fight.” 

Madame Minoret put on her shawl and bonnet and hurried 
off to Ursule with her son’s letter ; she found her alone, for 
it was about twelve o’clock. 

In spite of her audacity, Zelie Minoret was abashed by the 
girl’s cold looks, but she scolded herself for her cowardice, 
and took an airy tone. 

“ Here, Mademoiselle Mirouet, have the kindness to read 


THE MIN O RET PROPERTY. 


241 


this letter, and tell me what you think of it,” she exclaimed, 
holding out her son’s, letter. 

Ursule felt a thousand conflicting emotions on reading this 
letter, which proved to her how deeply she was loved, and 
what care Savinien would take of the honor of the woman he 
was about to marry ; but she was at once too pious and too 
charitable to desire to be the cause of death or suffering to her 
worst enemy. 

“ I promise you, madame, that I will hinder this duel, and 
your mind may be easy ; but I beg you to leave me the letter.” 

“ Let us see, my beauty, if we cannot do better than that. 
Listen to me. We have estates to the tune of forty-eight 
thousand a year round Le Rouvre, which is a real royal chateau; 
besides that we can give Desire twenty-four thousand francs a 
year in consols ; seventy-two thousand francs a year in all. 
You will allow that there are not many matches to compare 
with him. You are an ambitious little puss — -and you are 
very right,” added Zelie, noting Ursule’s eager gesture of 
denial. “ I have come to ask your hand for Desire ; you 
will take your godfather’s name — that will do it honor. 
Desire, as you may have seen, is a good-looking young fellow; 
he is very much liked at Fontainebleau, and will soon be 
public prosecutor. You, who are such a coaxing charmer, 
will get him to Paris. At Paris we will give you a fine house; 
you will shine and play a part in society ; for with seventy-two 
thousand francs a year and the salary of a good appointment, 
you and Desire will be in the highest circles. Consult your 
friends; you will see what they say.” 

“ I need only consult my heart, madame.” 

“ Pooh, pooh ! Now you will be talking of that little lady- 
killer, Savinien ! Hang it all ! you will pay very dear for his 
name, his little mustache twirled into two curly spikes, and 
his black hair. A pretty boy he is ! A nice business you will 
make of housekeeping on seven thousand francs a year, and a 
husband who ran into debt for a hundred thousand in two 
16 


242 


URSULE M/KOU&T. 


years in Paris. You don’t know it yet, my child, but all 
men are alike; and though I say it that shouldn’t, my Desire 
is every bit as good as a king’s son.” 

“ You are forgetting, madame, the danger that your son is 
in at this moment, which can only be averted by Monsieur 
de Portenduere’s wish to oblige me. The danger would be 
quite inevitable if he should learn that you are making such 
a dishonoring proposal. I may assure you, madame, that I 
shall be happier with the small income to which you allude 
than with the wealth you describe to dazzle me. For reasons 
unknown as yet — for everything will be known, madame — 
Monsieur Minoret, by his odious persecution, has brought to 
light the affection which binds me to Monsieur de Porten- 
duere, and which I may openly avow since his mother will 
give us her blessing ; I may tell you that this affection, now 
sanctioned and legitimate, is all I live for. No lot, however 
splendid, however elevated, would induce me to change. I 
love beyond all possibility of repentance or change. Hence 
it would be a crime, undoubtedly punished, if I were to marry 
a man to whom I could only bring a heart that is wholly 
Savinien’s. And, indeed, madame, since you drive me to it, 
I will say more: even if I did not love Monsieur de Porten- 
duere, I could never make up my mind to go through the 
sorrows and joys of life as your son’s companion. If Monsieur 
Savinien has been in debt, you have often paid Monsieur 
Desire’s. Our natures have neither the points of resemblance 
nor of difference which would allow of our living together 
without covert bitterness. I, perhaps, should not show him 
the tolerance that a woman owes to her husband ; I should 
therefore soon become a burden to him. Think no more of 
a marriage of which I am unworthy, and which I may decline 
without causing you the smallest regret, since, with such ad- 
vantages, you will not fail to find plenty of girls handsomer 
than I am, of higher rank, and much richer.” 

“ Swear to me, child,” said Zelie, “that you will pre- 


THE MINORET PROPERTY. 


243 


vent these two young men from taking their journey and 
fighting.” 

“ It will, I know, be the greatest sacrifice Monsieur de Por- 
tenduere can make for my sake. But my bridal wreath must 
not be claimed by blood-stained hands.” 

“ Very well, little cousin; I am much obliged to you, and 
I hope you may be happy.” 

“And I, madame, hope you may realize the promise of 
your son’s future.” 

This reply struck to the mother’s heart ; she remembered 
the predictions of Ursule’s last dream ; she stood up, her 
little eyes fixed on Ursule’s face — so pale, pure, and fair in 
her half-mourning dress — for Ursule had risen, as a hint to 
her self-called cousin to leave. 

“Then you believe in dreams?” asked Zelie. 

“ I suffer from them too much not to believe in them.” 

“ But then ” Zelie began. 

“Good-morning, madame,” said Ursule, with a bow to 
Madame Minoret, as she heard the cure’s step. 

The Abbe Chaperon was surprised to find Madame Minoret 
with Ursule. The anxiety depicted on the retired postmis- 
tress’ pinched and wrinkled face naturally led the priest to 
study the two women by turns. 

“ Do you believe in ghosts ? ” Zelie asked the cure. 

“Do you believe in dividends?” replied the cure, smil- 
ing. 

“ Sharpers — all of them ! ” thought Zelie; “ they want to 
get round us. The old priest, the old justice, and that ras- 
cally little Savinien have arranged it all. There are no more 
dreams in it than there are hairs in the palm of my hand.” 
She then courtesied twice with curt abruptness, and went 
away. 

“ I know why Savinien went to Fontainebleau,” said Ursule 
to the Abbe Chaperon, and she informed him of the duel, 
begging him to use his influence to prevent it. 


244 


UR SUL E MIROUET. 


“And Madame Minoret proposed to you to marry her 
son ? ” asked the old man. 

“Yes.” 

“ Minoret has probably confessed his crime to his wife,” 
added the cure. 

The justice, who came in at this moment, heard of the 
proceedings and the offer made by Zelie, whose hatred of 
Ursule was known to him, and he glanced at the cure as much 
as to say — “ Come out ; I want to speak to you about Ursule 
out of her hearing.” 

“Savinien will hear that you have refused eighty thousand 
francs a year and the cock of the walk of Nemours! ” he 
said. 

“Is that any sacrifice?” answered she. “Is anything a 
sacrifice to those who truly love? And is there any merit in 
my refusing the son of a man we despise? If others can 
make a virtue of their aversions, that should not be the moral 
code of a girl brought up by a Jordy, an Abbe Chaperon, 
and our dear doctor ! ” and she looked up at the portrait. 

Bongrand took Ursule’s hand and kissed it. 

“Do you know,” said the justice to the cure when they 
were in the street, “what Madame Minoret came for?” 

“What?” said the priest, looking at his friend with a keen 
eye that only revealed curiosity. 

“She wanted to make a kind of restitution.” 

“Then', do you think ?” began the Abbe Chaperon. 

“I do not think, I am sure — here, only look.” The jus- 
tice pointed to Minoret, who was coming towards them on 
his way home, for on leaving Ursule’s house the two friends 
had turned up the High Street. 

“Having to plead in court, I have naturally studied many 
cases of remorse, but I never saw one to compare with this. 
What can have produced that flaccid pallor in cheeks of which 
the skin was tight, as a drum, bursting with the coarse, rude 
health of a man without a care? What has set dark rings 


THE MIN 0 RET PROPERTY. 


245 


round those eyes, and deadened their rustic twinkle? Could 
you have believed that there would ever be a wrinkle on that 
brow, or that that colossus could ever have felt his brain 
reel ! At last he is conscious of a heart ! I know the phases 
of remorse, my dear cure, as you know those of repentance. 
Those that have hitherto come under my observation were 
awaiting punishment, or condemned to endure it, to settle 
their score with the world ; they were resigned, or breathed 
vengeance. But here we have remorse without expiation ; 
remorse pure and simple, greedy of its prey, and rending it. 
You are not yet aware,” said the justice, stopping Minoret, 
“ that Mademoiselle Mirouet has just refused your son’s 
hand?” 

“But,” added the cure, “you maybe easy; she will pre- 
vent his duel with Monsieur de Portenduere.” 

“Ah ! my wife has been successful,” said Minoret ; “ I am 
very glad. I was more dead than alive.” 

“You are indeed so altered that you are not like yourself,” 
said the justice. 

Minoret looked from one to the other to see if the cure 
had betrayed him, but the abbe preserved a fixity of counte- 
nance, a calm melancholy, that at once greatly reassured the 
guilty man. 

“And the change is all the more surprising,” the lawyer 
went on, “ because you ought to be perfectly happy. Why, 
here you are, lord of Le Rouvre, to which you have added 
Les Bordieres, all your farms, your mills, your meadows. You 
have a hundred thousand francs a year in consols ” 

“ I hold no consols,” said Minoret, hastily. 

“ Bah ! ” said the justice. “ Why, it is just the same with 
that as with your son’s love for Ursule. One day he will have 
nothing to say to her, and the next asks her to marry him. 
After having tried to kill Ursule with misery, you want to 
have her for a daughter-in-law ! My dear sir, there is some- 
thing at the bottom of all this ! ” 


246 URSULE MIROUET. 

Minoret wanted to answer ; he tried to find words ; he could 
only bring out — 

“You are funny, Mr. Justice of the Peace. Good-day, 
gentlemen.” 

And with this reply he slowly turned down the Rue des 
Bourgeois. 

“ He has stolen our poor Ursule’s fortune. But how can 
we prove it ? ” 

“God grant ” said the cure. 

“ God has endowed us with a feeling which is now speaking 
in that man,” replied the justice. “But we call that pre- 
sumptive evidence, and human justice requires something 
more.” 

The Abbe Chaperon kept silent, as a priest. As happens 
in such cases, he thought much more often than he wished of 
the robbery Minoret had almost confessed, and of Savinien’s 
happiness, so evidently delayed by Ursule’s lack of fortune; 
for the old lady owned in secret to her spiritual director how 
wrong she had been not to consent to her son’s marriage dur- 
ing the doctor’s lifetime. 

Next day, as he came down the altar steps after mass, he 
was struck by an idea, which came upon him with the force 
of a voice calling to him. He signed to Ursule to wait for him, 
and went home with her without breakfasting. 

“ My dear child,” said he, “ I want to see the two volumes 
in which your godfather, as you dream of him, says that he 
placed the certificates and notes.” 

Ursule and the cure went upstairs to the library and took 
down the third volume of the “Pandects.” On opening it, 
the cure observed, not without surprise, the mark left by some 
papers on the pages, which, offering less resistance than the 
boards of the binding, still showed the impression made by 
the certificates ; and in the other volume it was easy to see the 
readiness to open caused by the long pressure of a packet of 
papers between two pages of the folio. 


THE MIN O RET PROPERTY. 


247 


“ Come in, come up ! cried the abbe to the justice, who 
was just passing the house. 

Bongrand entered the room at the very moment when the 
priest was putting on his spectacles to read three numbers 
written by the dead doctor s hand on the colored vellum - 
paper guard placed inside the boards by the binder, and which 
Ursule had just detected. 

“ What is the meaning of that? Our worthy friend was 
too great a book-lover to spoil the guard of a binding,” said 
the Abbe Chaperon ; “ here are three numbers written between 
a first number, preceded by an M, and another preceded by 
an U.” 

“ What do you say ? ” cried Bongrand. “ Let me look at 
that. Good God!” he exclaimed, “is not this enough to 
open the eyes of an atheist, by proving to him the existence 
of Providence ? Human justice is, I believe, the develop- 
ment of a divine idea broodi ng ov er the universe. 11 

He seized Ursule and kissed her on the forehead. 

“ Oh ! my child, you shall be happy — rich — and through 
me!” 

“ What is it ? ” said the cure. 

“ My dear monsieur ! ” cried La Bougival, taking the tail 
of the justice’s blue coat, “let me embrace you for what 
you say.” 

“But explain yourself,” said the cure, “that we may not 
rejoice vainly.” 

“ If, in order to be rich, I must give anybody pain,” said 
Ursule, who had an inkling of a criminal trial, “ I ” 

“But think,” said the lawyer, interrupting Ursule, “of 
the happiness you will give our dear Savinien.” 

“ But you are mad ! ” said the cure. 

“ No, my dear cure,” said Bongrand. “ Listen. Certifi- 
cates of consols are numbered in as many series as there are 
letters of the alphabet, and each number bears the letter of 
its series; but certificates to bearer cannot have any letter, 


248 


URSULE MIROUET. 


since they are inscribed in no name. Hence, what you here 
see proves that, on the day when the good man placed his 
money in state securities, he made a note of the number of 
his certificate for fifteen thousand francs a year under the 
letter M — for Minoret ; of the numbers of three certificates 
to bearer; and of that of Ursule Mirouet under the letter U, 
number 23,534, which, as you see, immediately follows that 
of the certificate for fifteen thousand francs. This coincidence 
proves that these numbers are those of five certificates ac- 
quired on the same day, and noted by the old man in case of 
loss. I had advised him to put Ursule’s money into certifi- 
cates to bearer, and he must have invested his own money, 
the money he intended for Ursule, and her little property all 
on the same day. I am now going to Dionis to look at the 
inventory. If the number of the certificate he left in his own 
name is 23,533, l etter M, we may be certain that he invested 
through the same stockbroker, and on the same day : Firstly, 
his own money in one lump sum ; secondly, his savings in 
three sums, in certificates to bearer ; and, thirdly, his ward’s 
money ; the register of transfer will afford irrefutable proof. 
Ah, Minoret the wisehead, I have gotten you ! Mum’s the 
word, my friends ! ” 

The justice left the cure, Ursule, and La Bougival lost in 
admiration of the ways by which God brings innocence to 
happy issues. 

“The finger of God is here ! ” cried the Abbe Chaperon. 

“ Will they do him any hurt? ” asked Ursule. 

“ Oh, mademoiselle,” cried La Bougival, “I would give 
the rope to hang him with ! ” 

The justice was by this time at the house where Goupil was 
already the successor designate of Dionis, and went into the 
office with a careless air. 

“I want a little information,” said he to Goupil, “as to 
the estate of Doctor Minoret.” 

“ What is it ? ” asked Goupil. 


THE MIN O RET PROPERTY. 


249 


*' Did the old man leave one or more certificates of invest- 
ment in three per cents.?” 

“ He left fifteen thousand francs of income in three per 
cents.,” said Goupil, “in one certificate. I entered it my- 
self.” 

“ Then just look in the inventory,” said the justice. 

Goupil took down a box, turned over the contents, took 
out the document in question, looked through it, and read, 
“Item, one certificate — there, read for yourself — number 
2 3>533> letter M.” 

“ Be so kind as to hand over to me an extract of the par- 
ticulars from the inventory before one o’clock. I will wait 
for it.” 

“ What can you want it for ? ” asked Goupil. 

“Do you wish to become notary?” retorted the justice, 
looking sternly at the expectant successor to Dionis. 

“I should think so ! ” cried Goupil. “ I am sure I have 
eaten dirt enough to earn my title of ‘ Master.’ I beg you 
to understand, monsieur, that the wretched office clerk known 
as Goupil has no connection with ‘ Master ’ Jean-Sebastien- 
Marie Goupil, notary at Nemours, and husband to Made- 
moiselle Massin. The two men do not know each other; 
they are not even alike in any particular. Do you not see 
me?” 

Monsieur Bongrand then remarked Goupil’s dress. He 
wore a white stock, a shirt of dazzling whiteness with ruby 
studs, a red velvet waistcoat, a coat and trousers of fine black 
cloth and Paris make. He had neat boots, and his hair, 
carefully combed and smoothed, was elegantly scented. In 
short, he seemed to have been metamorphosed ! 

“ You are, in fact, another man,” said Bongrand. 

“ Morally as well as physically, monsieur. Wisdom comes 
with work; and money is the fountain of cleansing ” 

“ Morally as well as physically?” said the justice, settling 
his spectacles. 


250 


URSULE MIR O C/E T. 


“ Dear me, monsieur, is a man with a hundred thousand 
crowns a year ever a democrat ? Regard me as a respectable 
man, who has a taste for refinement, and for loving his wife,” 
he added, as Madame Goupil came in. “ I am so much 
altered,” said he, “ that I think my cousin Madame Cremiere 
quite witty. I have taken her in hand ; and even her daugh- 
ter no longer talks about pistons. Why, only yesterday, in 
speaking of Monsieur Savinien’s dog, she said he was making 
a point. Well, I did not repeat her blunder, though it is a 
funny one. I at once explained to her the difference be- 
tween pointing, making a point, and standing at point. So, 
you see, I am quite another man, and would not allow a 
client to get into a mess.” 

“Well, make haste then,” said Bongrand. “Give me 
that copy within an hour, and Goupil, the notary, will have 
done something towards repairing the misdeeds of the clerk.” 

After borrowing from the town doctor his cab and horse, the 
justice went to fetch the two accusing folios, Ursule’s certifi- 
cate, and the extract from the inventory ; armed with these, 
he drove to Fontainebleau to the public prosecutor there. 
Bongrand easily proved the abstraction of the three certifi- 
cates to be the act of one or another of the heirs-at-law, and 
then demonstrated Minoret’s guilt. 

“It accounts for his conduct,” said the lawyer. 

Then, as a measure of precaution, he stopped the transfer 
of the three certificates by a minute to the treasury, he desired 
Bongrand to ask what was the amount of interest due on the 
three certificates, and ascertain if they had been sold. 

While the justice went to do all this at Paris, the public 
prosecutor wrote a polite note to Madame Minoret to beg her 
to come to the assize town. Zelie, anxious about her son’s 
duel, dressed, had her own carriage out, and drove post-haste 
to Fontainebleau. The public prosecutor’s scheme was simple 
but formidable. By separating the husband and wife, he felt 
sure of learning the truth as a result of the terrors of the law. 


THE MI NO RET PROPERTY. 


251 


Zelie found the magistrate in his private room, and was 
absolutely thunderstruck by this unceremonious speech : 

“ Madame, I do not imagine that you are an accomplice in 
a robbery made at the time of Doctor Minoret’s death ; jus- 
tice is now on the traces, and you will save your husband 
from appearing at the bar by making a full confession of all 
you know about it. The punishment that threatens your 
husband is not, indeed, all you have to fear ; you must try to 
save your son from degradation, and not cut his throat. In 
a few minutes it will be too late ; the gendarmes are already 
on horseback, and the warrant for Minoret’s apprehension 
will be sent to Nemours.” 

Zelie fainted. When she came to herself, she confessed 
everything. After proving easily to this woman that she was 
an accomplice, the magistrate told her that, to avoid ruining 
her husband and son, he would proceed cautiously. 

“ You have had to deal with a man and not with a judge,” 
said he. ‘‘There is no charge on the part of the victim, nor 
has the theft been made public ; but your husband has com- 
mitted dreadful crimes, madame, which are usually tried be- 
fore a tribunal less accommodating than I am. In the present 
circumstances of the case you will be obliged to remain a 
prisoner. Oh, in my house, and on parole,” he added, see- 
ing Zelie ready to faint again. “ Remember that my strict 
duty would be to demand a warrant for your imprisonment, 
and institute an inquiry ; however, I am acting at present as 
the legal guardian of Mademoiselle Ursule Mirouet, and in 
her interests, wisely understood, a compromise will be advis- 
able.” 

“ Ah ! ” said Zelie. 

“ Write as follows to your husband.” And he dictated this 
letter to Zelie, who wrote it at his desk, with preposterously 
bad spelling : 

“ My Dear: — I am arrested, and I have told all. Give 

V 


252 


URSULE MIROUET. 


up the certificates left by our uncle to Monsieur de Porten- 
duere by virtue of the will you burned, for monsieur the public 
prosecutor has stopped them at the treasury.” 

“ By this means you will prevent his making denials, which 
would be his ruin,” said the lawyer, smiling at the spelling. 
“We will see about having the restitution carried out in a 
proper manner. My wife will make your stay at my house as 
little unpleasant as possible ; I advise you to say nothing to 
any one, and not to show your distress.” 

As soon as his deputy’s mother had confessed and been 
placed in safety, the magistrate sent for Desire, told him 
point by point the story of the robbery committed by his 
father, secretly to Ursule’s detriment, evidently to that of the 
co-heirs, and showed him the letter his mother had written. 
Desire immediately begged to be sent to Nemours, to see 
that his father made restitution. 

“ The whole case is very serious,” said his chief. “ The 
will having been destroyed, if the thing becomes known, the 
co-heirs, Massin and Cremiere, your relations, may intervene. 
I have now sufficient evidence against your father. I give 
your mother back to you ; this little ceremony lias sufficiently 
enlightened her as to her duty. In her eyes I shall seem 
to have yielded to your entreaties in releasing her. Go to 
Nemours with her, and guide all these difficulties to a happy 
issue. Fear nobody. Monsieur Bongrand loves Mademoiselle 
Mirouet too well to commit any indiscretion.” 

Zelie and Desire set out at once for Nemours. Three hours 
after his deputy’s departure, the public prosecutor received by 
express messenger the following letter, of which the spelling 
is corrected, not to make an unhappy man ridiculous : 

“ To the Public Prosecutor of the Court of Assizes at 
Fontainebleau. 

“ Monsieur: — God has not been so merciful to us as you 


THE MI NO RET PROPERTY. 


253 


have been, and an irreparable misfortune has fallen on us. 
On arriving at the bridge of Nemours, a strap came unfast- 
ened. My wife was at the back of the chaise without a ser- 
vant ; the horses smelt the stable. My son, afraid of their 
restiveness, would not let the coachman get down, and got 
out himself to buckle it up. At the moment when he turned 
to get up again by his mother, the horses started off ; Desire 
did not make way quickly enough by squeezing back against 
the parapet, the iron step cut his legs ; he fell, and the hind 
wheel went over his body. The messenger riding express to 
Paris to fetch the first surgeons will carry you this letter, 
which my son, in the midst of his suffering, desires me to 
write, to express to you our entire submission to your de- 
cisions in the business which was bringing him home. 

“ I shall be grateful to you till my latest breath for the 
way in which you have proceeded, and will justify your 
confidence. 

“Francois Minoret.” 

This terrible event upset the whole town of Nemours. The 
excited crowd that gathered round Minoret’s gate showed 
Savinien that his revenge had been taken in hand by one 
more powerful than he. The young man went at once to 
Ursule, and the young girl and the cure alike felt more horror 
than surprise. The next day, after the first treatment, when 
the Paris doctors and surgeons had given their advice, which 
was unanimous as to the necessity for amputating both legs, 
Minoret, pale, dejected, and heart-broken, came, accompanied 
by the cure, to Ursule’s house, where he found Bongrand and 
Savinien. 

“ Mademoiselle,” said he, “I am guilty towards you; but 
though all the ill I have done cannot be entirely repaired, 
some I can expiate. My wife and I have made up our minds 
to give you, as an absolute possession, our estate of Le Rouvre 
if we preserve our son — as well as if we have the terrible grief 


254 URSULE MIROUET \ 

of losing him.” As he ceased speaking, the man melted into 
tears. 

u I may assure you, my dear Ursule,” said the cure, “ that 
you may and ought to accept a part of this gift.” 

“ Do you forgive us?” said the colossus humbly, and 
kneeling at the feet of the astonished girl. “ In a few hours 
the operation is to be performed by the first surgeon of the 
Hotel- Dieu ; but I put no trust in human science ; I believe 
in the omnipotence of God ! If you forgive me, if you will 
go and ask God to preserve us our son, he will have strength 
to endure this torment, and we shall have the happiness of 
keeping him, I am sure of it.” 

“ Let us all go to the church ! ” said Ursule, rising. She 
was no sooner on her feet than she gave a piercing shriek, fell 
back in her chair, and fainted away. When she recovered 
her senses, she saw her friends, with the exception of Minoret, 
who had rushed off to find a doctor, all with their eyes fixed 
on her, anxiously expecting her to speak a word. That word 
filled every heart with horror. 

“ I saw my godfather at the door,” she said. “ He signed 
to me that there was no hope.” 

And, in fact, the day after the operation, Desire died, 
carried off by fever and the revulsion of the humors which 
follows on such operations. Madame Minoret, whose heart 
held no sentiment but that of motherhood, went mad after 
her son’s funeral, and was taken by her husband to the care 
of Doctor Blanche for medical treatment, where she died in 
January, 1841. 

Three months after these events, in January, 1837, Ursule 
married Savinien, with Madame de Portenduere’s consent. 
Minoret intervened at the signing of the contract to settle on 
Mademoiselle Mirouet, by deed of gift, his estate of Le 
Rouvre, and twenty-eight thousand francs a year in consols, 
reserving of all his fortune only his uncle’s house and six 
thousand francs a year. He has become the most charitable 


THE MI NO RET PROPERTY. 


255 


and pious man in Nemours, churchwarden of the parish, and 
the providence of the unfortunate. 

“The poor have taken the place of my child,” he says. 

If you have ever observed by the roadside, in districts 
where the oak is lopped low, some old tree, bleached, and, as 
it would seem, blasted, but still throwing out shoots, its sides 
riven, crying out for the axe, you will have an idea of the old 
postmaster, white-haired, bent, and lean, in whom the old 
folks of the district can trace nothing of the happy lout whom 
we saw watching for his son at the beginning of this tale; he 
no longer takes snuff in the same way even ; he bears some 
burden besides his body. In short, it is perceptible in every- 
thing that the hand of God has been heavily laid on that form 
to make it a terrible example. After hating his uncle’s ward 
so bitterly, this old man, like Doctor Minoret himself, has so 
set his affections on Ursule, that he is the self-constituted 
steward of her property at Nemours. 

Monsieur and Madame de Portendu^re spend five months 
of the year in Paris, where they have purchased a splendid 
house in the Faubourg St. -Germain. After bestowing her 
house at Nemours on the Sisters of Charity to be used as a 
free school, Madame de Portenduere the elder went to live at 
Le Rouvre, where La Bougival is the head gatekeeper. Cab- 
irolle’s father, formerly the guard of the “Dueler,” a man 
of sixty, has married La Bougival, who owns twelve hundred 
francs a year in consols, besides the comfortable profits of her 
place. Cabirolle’s son is Monsieur dc Portenduere’s coachman. 

When, in the C’namps-Elysees, you see one of those neat 
little low carriages, known as escargots (or snail-shells), drive 
past, and admire a pretty, fair woman leaning lightly against a 
young man, her face surrounded by a myriad of curls, like 
light foliage, and eyes like luminous periwinkle flowers, full 
of love — if you should feel the sting of envious wishes, 
remember that this handsome couple, the favorites of God, 
have paid in advance their tribute to the woes of life. These 


256 


VRSULE MIROUET. 

married lovers will probably be the Vicomte de Portenduere 
and his wife. There are not two such couples in Paris. 

“ It is the prettiest happiness I ever saw,” said the Com- 
tesse d’Estorade, not long since. 

So give those happy children your blessing instead of envy- 
ing them, and try to find an Ursule Mirouet — a young girl 
brought up by three old men, and that best of mothers — 
adversity. 

Goupil, who is helpful to everybody, and justly regarded as 
the wittiest man in Nemours, is esteemed by the little town ; 
but he is punished in his children, who are hideous, rickety, 
and hydrocephalous. His predecessor, Dionis, flourishes in 
the Chamber of Deputies, of which he is one of the greatest 
ornaments, to the great satisfaction of the King of the 
French, who sees Madame Dionis at every state ball. Madame 
Dionis relates to all the town of Nemours the particulars of 
her reception at the Tuileries, and the grandeurs of the King’s 
court. She is queen at Nemours, by virtue of a king who is 
certainly popular in that sense. 

Bongrand is president of the court of justice at Melun, and 
his son is on the high road to becoming a very respectable 
public prosecutor. 

Madame Cremiere still says the funniest things in the world. 
She writes tambour tambourg , and says it is because her pen 
splutters. On the eve of her daughter’s marriage, she told 
her, in concluding her advice to her, that a wife ought to be 
the toiling caterpillar of her home, and keep a sphinx’s eye 
on everything. Indeed, Goupil is making a collection of his 
cousin’s absurd blunders, a Cremieriana . 

“ We have had the grief of losing our good Abb£ Chaperon 
this winter,” says the Vicomtesse de Portenduere, who nursed 
him during his illness. All the district attended his funeral. 
Nemours is fortunate, for this saintly man’s successor is the 
venerable Cure de Saint-Lange. 

Paris, June-July , 1841. 


MADAME FIRMIANI. 


( To my dear Alexa?idre de Berny, from his old 
friend De Balzac .) 

Many tales, rich in situations, or made dramatic bv the 
endless sport of chance, carry their plot in themselves, and 
can be related artistically or simply by any lips without the 
smallest loss of the beauty of the subject ; but there are some 
incidents of human life to which only the accents of the heart 
can give life ; there are certain anatomical details, so to 
speak, of which the delicacy appears only under the most 
skillful infusions of mind. Again, there are portraits which 
demand a soul, and are nothing without the more ethereal 
features of the responsive countenance. Finally, there are 
certain things which we know not how to say, or to depict, 
without I know not what unconceived harmonies that are 
under the influence of a day or an hour, of a happy conjunc- 
tion of celestial signs, or of some occult moral predisposition. 

Such revelations as these are absolutely required for the 
telling of this simple story, in which I would fain interest 
some of those naturally melancholy and pensive souls which 
are fed on bland emotions. If the writer, like a surgeon by 
the side of a dying friend, has become imbued with a sort of 
respect for the subject he is handling, why should not the 
reader share this inexplicable feeling? Is it so difficult to 
throw one’s self into that vague, nervous melancholy which 
sheds gray hues on all our surroundings, which is half an ill- 
ness, though its languid suffering is sometimes a pleasure ? 

If you are thinking by chance of the dear friends you have 
lost ; if you are alone, and it is night, or the day is dying, 
read this narrative ; otherwise, throw the book aside, here. 
If you have never buried some kind aunt, an invalid or poor, 
17 ( 257 ) 


258 


MADAME FIR MIA NI. 


you will not understand these pages. To some, they will be 
odorous as of musk ; to others, they will be as colorless, as 
strictly virtuous as those of Florian. In short, the reader 
must have known the luxury of tears ; must have felt the 
wordless grief of a memory that drifts lightly by, bearing a 
shade that is dear but remote ; he must possess some of those 
remembrances that make us at the same time regret those 
whom the earth has swallowed, and smile over vanished joys. 

And now the author would have you believe that for all the 
wealth of England he would not extort from poetry even one 
of her fictions to add grace to this narrative. This is a true 
story, on which you may pour out the treasure of your sensi- 
bilities, if you have any. 

In these days our language has as many dialects as there are 
men in the great human family. And it is a really curious 
and interesting thing to listen to the different views or ver- 
sions of one and the same thing, or event, as given by the 
various species which make up the monograph of the Parisian 
— the Parisian being taken as a generic term. Thus you 
might ask a man of the matter-of-fact type, “ Do you know 
Madame Firmiani?” and this man would interpret Madame 
Firmiani by such an inventory as this: “A large house in 
the Rue du Bac, rooms handsomely furnished, fine pictures, 
a hundred thousand francs a year in good securities, and a 
husband who was formerly receiver-general in the department 
of Montenotte.” Having thus spoken, your matter-of-fact 
man — stout and roundabout, almost always dressed in black — * 
draws up his lower lip, so as to cover the upper lip, and nods 
his head, as much as to say, “Very respectable people, there 
is nothing to be said against them.” Ask him no more. 
Your matter-of-fact people state everything in figures, divi- 
dends, or real estate — a great word in their dictionary. 

Turn to your right, go and question that young man, who 
belongs to the lounger species, and repeat your inquiry. 


MADAME FIR MIA ATI. 


259 


“Madame Firmiani?” says he. “Yes, yes, I know her 
very well. I go to her evenings. She receives on Wednes- 
days; a very good house to know.” Madame Firmiani is 
already metamorphosed into a house. The house is not a 
mere mass of stones architecturally put together ; no, this 
word, in the language of the lounger, has no equivalent. 
And here your lounger, a dry-looking man, with a pleasant 
smile, saying clever nothings, but always with more acquired 
wit than natural wit, bends to your ear, and says with a know- 
ing air: “I never saw Monsieur Firmiani. His social posi- 
tion consists in managing estates in Italy. But Madame 
Firmiani is French, and spends her income as a Parisian 
should. She gives excellent tea ! It is one of the few houses 
where you really can amuse yourself, and where everything 
they give you is exquisite. It is very difficult to get intro- 
duced, and the best society is to be seen in her drawing- 
rooms.” Then the lounger emphasizes his last words by 
gravely taking a pinch of snuff ; he applies it to his nose in 
little dabs, and seems to be saying: “I go to the house, but 
do not count on my introducing you.” 

To folks of this type Madame Firmiani keeps a sort of inn 
without a sign. 

“ Why on earth can you want to go to Madame Firmiani’s? 
It is as dull there as it is at court. Of what use are brains if 
they do not keep you out of such drawing-rooms, where, with 
poetry such as is now current, you hear the most trivial little 
ballad just hatched out.” 

You have asked one of your friends who comes under the 
class of petty autocrats — men who would like to have the 
universe under lock and key, and have nothing done without 
their leave. They are miserable at other people’s enjoyment, 
can forgive nothing but vice, wrong-doing, and infirmities, 
and want nothing but proteges. Aristocrats by taste, they are 
republicans out of spite, simply to discover many inferiors 
among their equals. 


260 


MADAME FIRMIANI. 


“ Oh, Madame Firmiani, my dear fellow, is one of those 
adorable women whom nature feels to be a sufficient excuse 
for all the ugly ones she has created by mistake ; she is be- 
witching, she is kind ! I should like to be in power to be 
king, to have millions of money, solely ” (and three words are 
whispered in your ear). “Shall I introduce you to her?” 

This young man is a schoolboy, known for his audacious 
bearing among men and his extreme shyness in private. 

“ Madame Firmiani ! ” cries another, twirling his cane in 
the air. “I will tell you what I think of her. She is a 
woman of between thirty and thirty-five, face a little passec, 
fine eyes, a fiat figure, a worn contralto voice, dresses a great 
deal, rouges a little, manners charming ; in short, my dear 
fellow, the remains of a pretty woman which are still worthy 
of a passion.” 

This verdict is pronounced by a specimen of the genus cox- 
comb, who, having just breakfasted, does not weigh his words, 
and is going out riding. At such moments a coxcomb is piti- 
less. 

“ She has a collection of magnificent pictures in her house. 
Go and see her,” says another; “ nothing can be finer.” 

You have come upon the species amateur. This individual 
quits you to go to Perignon’s, or to Tripet’s. To him Madame 
Firmiani is a number of painted canvases. 

A wife. — “Madame Firmiani? I will not have you go 
there.” This phrase is the most suggestive view of all. 
Madame Firmiani. A dangerous woman ! A siren ! She 
dresses well, has good taste ; she spoils the night’s rest of 
every wife. The speaker is of the species shrew. 

An attache to an embassy. — “ Madame Firmiani ? From 
Antwerp, is she not? I saw that woman, very handsome, 
about ten years ago. She was then at Rome.” 

Men of the order of attaches have a mania for utterances a 
la Talleyrand, their wit is often so subtle that their perception 
is imperceptible. They are like those billiard players who 


MADAME FIR MIA MI. 


261 


miss the balls with infinite skill. These men are not generally 
great talkers ; but when they talk it is of nothing less than 
Spain, Vienna, Italy, or Saint Petersburg. The names of 
countries act on them like springs ; you press them and the 
machinery plays all its tunes. 

“Does not that Madame Firmiani see a great deal of the 
Faubourg Saint-Germain?” This is asked by a person who 
desires claims to distinction. She adds a de to everybody’s 
name — to Monsieur Dupin, senior, to Monsieur Lafayette ; 
she flings it right and left and spatters people with it. She 
spends her life in anxieties as to what is correct ; but, for her 
sins, she lives in the unfashionable Marais, and her husband 
was an attorney — but an attorney in the King’s court. 

“ Madame Firmiani, monsieur? I do not know her.” This 
man is of the class of dukes. He recognizes no woman who 
lias not been presented. Excuse him ; he was created duke 
by Napoleon. 

“Madame Firmiani? Was she not a singer at the Italian 
opera house?” A man of the genus simpleton. The indi- 
viduals of this genus must have an answer to everything. 
They would rather speak calumnies than be silent. 

Two old ladies {the wives of retired lawyers'). The first 
(she has a cap with bows of ribbon, her face is wrinkled, her 
nose sharp ; she holds a prayer-book, and her voice is harsh). — 
“What was her maiden name — this Madame Firmiani? ” 

The second (she has a little red face like a lady-apple, 
and a gentle voice). — “She was a Cadignan, my dear, niece 
of the old Prince de Cadignan, and cousin, consequently, to 
the Due de Maufrigneuse.” 

Madame Firmiani then is a Cadignan. Bereft of virtues, 
fortune, and youth, she would still be a Cadignan ; that, like 
a prejudice, is always rich and living. 

An eccentric. — “My dear fellow, I never saw any clogs 
in her anteroom ; you may go to her house without com- 
promising yourself, and play there without hesitation ; for if 


262 


MADAME FIRMIANI. 


there should be any rogues, they will be people of quality, 
consequently there is no quarreling.” 

An old man of the species observer. — “You go to 
Madame Firmiani’s, my dear fellow, and you find a hand- 
some woman lounging indolently by the fire. She will 
scarcely move from her chair ; she rises only to greet women, 
or ambassadors, or dukes — people of importance. She is very 
gracious, she charms you, she talks well, and likes to talk of 
everything. She bears every indication of a passionate soul, 
but she is credited with too many adorers to have a lover. If 
suspicion rested on only two or three intimate visitors, we 
might know which was her gallant slave. But she is all 
mystery ; she is married, and we have never seen her hus- 
band ; Monsieur Firmiani is purely a creature of fancy, like 
the third horse we are made to pay for when traveling post, 
and which we never see ; madame, if you believe the profes- 
sionals, has the finest contralto voice in Europe, and has not 
sung three times since she came to Paris; she receives num- 
bers of people, and goes nowhere.” 

The observer speaks as an oracle. His words, his anec- 
dotes, his quotations must all be accepted as truth, or you risk 
being taken for a man without knowledge of the world, with- 
out capabilities. He will slander you lightly in twenty draw- 
ing-rooms, where he is as essential as the first piece in the 
bill— pieces so often played to the benches, but which once 
upon a time were successful. The observer is a man of fortv. 
never dines at home, and professes not to be dangerous to 
women ; he wears powder and a maroon-colored coat ; he 
can always have a seat in various boxes at the Theatre des 
Bouffons. He is sometimes mistaken for a parasite, but he 
has held too high positions to be suspected of sponging, and, 
indeed, possesses an estate, in a department of which the 
name has never leaked out. 

“Madame Firmiani? Why, my dear boy, she was a mis- 
tress of Murat’s. ’ ’ This gentleman is a contradictory. They . 


MADAME FIRMIANI. 


263 


supply the errata to every memory, rectify every fact, bet you 
a hundred to one, are cock-sure of everything. You catch 
them out in a single evening in flagrant delictions of ubiquity. 
They assert that they were in Paris at the time of Mallet’s 
conspiracy, forgetting that half an hour before they had 
crossed the Beresina. The contradictories are almost all 
members of the Legion of Honor ; they talk very loud, have 
receding foreheads, and play high. 

“Madame Firmiani, a hundred thousand francs a year? 
Are you mad ? Really some people scatter thousands a year 
with the liberality of authors, to whom it costs nothing to 
give their heroines handsome fortunes. But Madame Firmiani 
is a flirt who ruined a young fellow the other day, and hin- 
dered him from making a very good marriage. If she were 
not handsome, she would be penniless.” 

This speaker you recognize; he is one of the envious, and 
we will not sketch his least feature. The species is as 
well known as that of the domestic cat. How is the per- 
petuity of envy to be explained ! A vice which is wholly 
unprofitable ! 

People of fashion, literary people, very good people, and 
people of every kind were, in the month of January, 1824, 
giving out so many different opinions on Madame Firmiani 
that it would be tiresome to report them all. We have only 
aimed at showing that a man wishing to know her, without 
choosing, or being able, to go to her house, would have been 
equally justified in the belief that she was a widow or a wife — 
silly or witty, virtuous or immoral, rich or poor, gentle or 
devoid of soul, handsome or ugly; in fact, there were as 
many Mesdames Firmiani as there are varieties in social life, 
or sects in the Catholic Church. Frightful thought ! We 
are all like lithographed plates, of which an endless num- 
ber of copies are taken off by slander. These copies 
resemble or differ from the original by touches so impercepti- 
bly slight that, but for the calumnies of our friends and the 


204 


MADAME FIR MIAMI. 


witticisms of newspapers, reputation would depend on the 
balance struck by each hearer between the limping truth and 
the lies to which Parisian wit lends wings. 

Madame Firmiani, like many other women of dignity and 
noble pride, who close their hearts as a sanctuary and scorn 
the world, might have been very hardly judged by Monsieur 
de Bourbonne, an old gentleman of fortune, who had thought 
a good deal about her during the past winter. As it hap- 
pened, this gentleman belonged to the Provincial land-owner 
class, folks who are accustomed to inquire into everything, 
and to make bargains with peasants. In this business a man 
grows keen-witted in spite of himself, as a soldier, in the 
long run, acquires the courage of routine. This inquirer, 
a native of Touraine, and not easily satisfied by the Paris 
dialects, was a very honorable gentleman who rejoiced in a 
nephew, his sole heir, for whom he planted his poplars. 
Their more than natural affection gave rise to much evil- 
speaking, which individuals of the various species of Tour- 

• 

angeau formulated with much mother wit ; but it would be 
useless to record it; it would pale before that of Parisian 
tongues. When a man can think of his heir without dis- 
pleasure, as he sees fine rows of poplars improving every day, 
his affection increases with each spadeful of earth he turns at 
the foot of his trees. Though such phenomena of sensibility 
may be uncommon, they still are to be met with in Touraine. 

This much-loved nephew, whose name was Octave de Camps, 
was descended from the famous Abbe de Camps, so well known 
to the learned, or to the bibliomaniacs, which is not the same 
thing. 

Provincial folks have a disagreeable habit of regarding 
young men who sell their reversions with a sort of respectable 
horror. This Gothic prejudice is bad for speculation, which 
the government has hitherto found it necessary to encourage. 
Now, without consulting his uncle, Octave had on a sudden 
disposed of an estate in favor of the speculative builders. The 


MADAME FIRMIANI. 


265 


chateau of Villaines would have been demolished but for the 
offers made by his old uncle to the representatives of the de- 
molishing fraternity. To add to the testator’s wrath, a friend 
of Octave s, a distant relation, one of those cousins with small 
wealth and great cunning, who lead their prudent neighbors 
to say, “ I should not like to go to law with him!” had 
called, by chance, on Monsieur de Bourbonne and informed 
him that his nephew was ruined. Monsieur Octave de Camps, 
after dissipating his fortune for a certain Madame Firmiani, 
and not daring to confess his sins, had been reduced to giving 
lessons in mathematics, pending his coming into his uncle’s 
leavings. This distant cousin — a sort of Charles Moor — had 
not been ashamed of giving this disastrous news to the old 
country gentleman at the hour when, sitting before his spacious 
hearth, he was digesting a copious provincial dinner. But 
would-be legatees do not get rid of an uncle so easily as they 
could wish. This uncle, thanks to his obstinacy, refusing to 
believe the distant cousin, came out victorious over the in- 
digestion brought on by the biography of his nephew. Some 
blows fall on the heart, others on the brain ; the blow struck 
by the distant cousin fell on the stomach, and produced little 
effect, as the good man had a strong one. 

Monsieur de Bourbonne, as a worthy disciple of Saint 
Thomas, came to Paris without telling Octave, and tried to 
get information as to his heir’s insolvency. The old gentle- 
man, who had friends in the Faubourg Saint-Germain — the 
Listomeres, the Lenoncourts, and the Vandenesses — heard so 
much slander, so much that was true, and so much that was 
false concerning Madame Firmiani, that he determined to call 
on her, under the name of Monsieur de Rouxellay, the name 
of his place. The prudent old man took care, in going to 
study Octave’s mistress — as she was said to be — to choose an 
evening when he knew that the young man was engaged on 
work to be well paid for; for Madame Firmiani was always at 
home to her young friend, a circumstance that no one could 


266 


MADAME FIRMIANI. 


account for. As to Octave’s ruin, that, unfortunately, was 
no fiction. 

Monsieur de Rouxellay was not at all like a stage uncle. 
As an old musketeer, a man of the best society, who had his 
successes in his day, he knew how to introduce himself with a 
courtly air, remembered the polished manners of the past, had 
a pretty wit, and understood almost all the role of nobility. 
Though he loved the Bourbons with noble frankness, believed 
in God as gentlemen believe, and read only the Quotidienne , 
he was by no means so ridiculous as the Liberals of his depart- 
ment would have wished. He could hold his own with men 
about the court, so long as he was not expected to talk of 
“ Moses,” or the play, or romanticism, or local color, or rail- 
ways. He had not gotten beyond Monsieur de Voltaire, Mon- 
sieur le Comte de Buffon, Peyronnet, and the Chevalier 
Gluck, the Queen’s private musician. 

u Madame,” said he to the Marquise de Listomere, to 
whom he had given his arm to go into Madame Firmiani’s 
room, “ if this woman is my nephew’s mistress, I pity her. 
How can she bear to live in the midst of luxury and know 
that he is in a garret ? Has she no soul ? Octave is a fool to 
have invested the price of the estate of Villaines in the heart 
of a ” 

Monsieur de Bourbonne was of a fossil species, and spoke 
only the language of a past day. 

“ But suppose he had lost it at play? ” 

“ Well, madame, he would have had the pleasure of 
playing.” 

“ You think he has had no pleasure for his money ? Look, 
here is Madame Firmiani.” 

The old uncle’s brightest memories paled at the sight of 
his nephew’s supposed mistress. His anger died in a polite 
speech wrung from him by the presence of Madame Firmiani. 
By one of those chances which come only to pretty women, 
it was a moment when all her beauties shone with particular 


MADAME F1RMIANI. 


267 


brilliancy, the result, perhaps, of the glitter of wax-lights, of 
an exquisitely simple dress, of an indefinable reflection from 
the elegance in which she lived and moved. Only long study 
of the petty revolutions of an evening party in a Paris salon 
can enable one to appreciate the imperceptible shades that 
can tinge and change a woman’s face. There are moments 
when, pleased with her dress, feeling herself brilliant, happy 
at being admired and seeing herself the queen of a room full 
of remarkable men, all smiling at her, a Parisian is conscious 
of her beauty and grace ; she grows the lovelier by all the 
looks she meets ; they give her animation, but their mute 
homage is transmitted by subtle glances to the man she loves. 
In such a moment a woman is invested, as it were, with super- 
natural power, and becomes a witch, an unconscious coquette ; 
she involuntarily inspires the passion which is a secret intoxi- 
cation to herself, she has smiles and looks that are fascinating. 
If this excitement which comes from the soul lends attractive- 
ness even to ugly women, with what splendor does it not 
clothe a naturally elegant creature, finely made, fair, fresh, 
bright-eyed, and, above all, dressed with such taste as artists 
and even her most spiteful rivals must admit. 

Have you ever met, for your happiness, some woman whose 
harmonious tones give to her speech the charm that is no less 
conspicuous in her manners, who knows how to talk and to 
be silent, who cares for you with delicate feeling, whose words 
are happily chosen and her language pure ? Her banter flit- 
ters you, her criticism does not sting ; she neither preaches 
nor disputes, but is interested in leading a discussion, and 
stops it at the right moment. Her manner is friendly and 
gay, her politeness is unforced, her eagerness to please is not 
servile ; she reduces respect to a mere gentle shade ; she never 
tires you, and leaves you satisfied with her and yourself. You 
will see her gracious presence stamped on the things she col- 
lects about her. In her home everything charms the eye, and 
you breathe, as it seems, your native air. This woman is 


268 


MADAME FIR MI A NT. 


quite natural. You never feel an effort, she flaunts nothing, 
her feelings are expressed with simplicity because they are 
genuine. Though candid, she never wounds the most sensi- 
tive pride ; she accepts men as God made them, pitying the 
vicious, forgiving defects and absurdities, sympathizing with 
every age, and vexed with nothing because she has the tact to 
forefend everything. At once tender and lively, she first 
constrains and then consoles you. You love her so truly that, 
if this angel does wrong, you are ready to justify her. Then 
you know Madame Firmiani. 

By the time old Bourbonne had talked with this woman, for 
a quarter of an hour, sitting by her side, his nephew was ab- 
solved. He understood that, true or false, Octave’s connection 
with Madame Firmiani no doubt covered some mystery. Re- 
turning to the illusions of his youth, and judging of Madame 
Firmiani’s heart by her beauty, the old gentleman thought 
that a woman so sure of her dignity as she seemed, was inca- 
pable of a base action. Her black eyes spoke of so much 
peace of mind, the lines of her face were so noble, the forms 
so pure, and the passion of which she was accused seemed to 
weigh so little on her heart, that, as he admired all the pledges 
given to love and to virtue by that adorable countenance, the 
old man said to himself, “ My nephew has committed some 
folly.” 

Madame Firmiani owned to twenty-five. But the matter- 
of-facts could prove that, having been married in 1813 at the 
age of sixteen, she must be at least eight-and-twenty in 1825. 
Nevertheless the same persons declared that she had never at 
any period of her life been so desirable, so perfectly a woman. 
She had no children, and had never had any; the hypothet- 
ical Firmiani, a respectable man of forty in 1813, had, it was 
said, only his name and fortune to offer her. So Madame 
Firmiani had come to the age when a Parisian best under- 
stands what passion is, and perhaps longs for it innocently in 
her unemployed hours: she had everything that the world can 


MADAME FIRMIANI. 


269 


sell, or lend, or give. The attaches declared she knew every- 
thing; the contradictories said she had yet many things to 
learn ; the observers noticed that her hands were very white, 
her foot very small, her movements a little too undulating ; 
but men of every species envied or disputed Octave’s good 
fortune, agreeing that she was the most aristocratic beauty in 
Paris. 

Still young, rich, a perfect musician, witty, exquisite; 
welcomed, for the sake of the Cadignans, to whom she was 
related through her mother, by the Princess de Blamont- 
Chauvry, the oracle of the aristocratic quarter ; beloved by 
her rivals the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse her cousin, the 
Marquise d’Espard, and Madame de Macumer, she flattered 
every vanity which feeds or excites love. And, indeed, she 
was the object of too many desires not to be the victim of 
fashionable detraction and those delightful calumnies which 
are wittily hinted behind a fan or in a whispered aside. 
Hence the remarks with which this story opened were neces- 
sary to mark the contrast between the real Firmiani and the 
Firmiani known to the world. Though some women forgave 
her for being happy, others could not overlook her respecta- 
bility; now there is nothing so terrible, especially in Paris, 
as suspicion without foundation ; it is impossible to kill it. 

This sketch of a personality so admirable by nature can 
only give a feeble idea of it ; it would need the brush of an 
Ingres to represent the dignity of the brow, the mass of fine 
hair, the majesty of the eyes, all the thoughts betrayed by the 
varying hues of the complexion. There was something of 
everything in this woman ; poets could see in her both Joan 
of Arc and Agnes Sorel ; but there was also the unknown 
woman — the soul hidden behind this deceptive mask — the 
soul of Eve, the wealth of evil and treasures of goodness, 
wrong and resignation, crime and self-sacrifice — the Dona 
Julia and Haidee of Byron’s “ Don Juan.” 

The old soldier very boldly remained till the last in Madame 


270 


MADAME FIR MI A NT. 


Firmiani’s drawing-room ; she found him quietly seated in an 
armchair, and staying with the pertinacity of a fly that must 
be killed to be gotten rid of. The clock marked two in the 
morning. 

“Madame,” said the old gentleman, just as Madame Fir- 
miani rose in the hope of making her guest understand that it 
was her pleasure that he should go. “ Madame, I am Monsieur 
Octave de Camps’ uncle.” 

Madame Firmiani at once sat down again, and her agitation 
was evident. In spite of his perspicacity, the planter of 
poplars could not make up his mind whether shame or pleasure 
made her turn pale. There are pleasures which do not exist 
without a little coy bashfulness — delightful emotions which 
the chastest soul would fain keep behind a veil. The more 
sensitive a woman is, the more she lives to conceal her soul’s 
greatest joys. Many women, incomprehensible in their 
exquisite caprices, at times long to hear a name spoken by all 
the world, while they sometimes would sooner bury it in their 
hearts. Old Bourbonne did not read Madame Firmiani’s 
agitation quite in this light ; but forgive him ; the country 
gentleman was suspicious. 

“Indeed, monsieur?” said Madame Firmiani, with one 
of those clear and piercing looks in which we men can never 
see anything, because they question us too keenly. 

“Indeed, madame ; and do you know what I have been 
told — I, in the depths of the country? That my nephew has 
ruined himself for you ; and the unhappy boy is in a garref 
while you live here in gold and silks. You will, I hope, 
forgive my rustic frankness, for it may be useful to you to be 
informed of the slander.” 

“ Stop, monsieur,” said Madame Firmiani, interrupting the 
gentleman with an imperious gesture, “ I know all that. You 
are too polite to keep the conversation to this subject when I 
beg you to change it. You are too gallant, in the old-fashioned 
sense of the word,” she added, with a slightly ironical 


MADAME FIE MIA NI. 


271 


emphasis, “ not to acknowledge that you have no right to 
cross-question me. However, it is ridiculous in me to justify 
myself. I hope you have a good enough opinion of my char- 
acter to believe in the utter contempt I feel for money, though 
I was married without any fortune whatever to a man who had 
an immense fortune. I do not know whether your nephew is 
rich or poor; if I have received him, if I still receive him, 
it is because I regard him as worthy to move in the midst of 
my friends. All my friends, monsieur, respect each other ; 
they know that I am not so philosophical as to entertain people 
whom I do not esteem. That, perhaps, shows a lack of 
charity; but my guardian angel has preserved in me, to this 
day, an intense aversion for gossip and dishonor.” 

Though her voice was not quite firm at the beginning of 
this reply, the last words were spoken by Madame Firmiani 
with the cool decision of Celim'ene rallying the Misanthrope. 

“Madame,” the Count resumed in a broken voice, “I am 
an old man — I am almost a father to Octave — I therefore must 
humbly crave your pardon beforehand for the only question I 
shall be so bold as to ask you ; and I give you my word of 
honor as a gentleman that your reply will die here,” and he 
laid his hand on his heart with a really religious gesture. 
“ Does gossip speak the truth ; do you love Octave ? ” 

“ Monsieur,” said she, “ I should answer any one else with 
a look. But you, since you are almost a father to Monsieur 
de Camps, you I will ask what you would think of a woman 
who, in reply to your question, should say, Yes. To confess 
one’s love to the man we love — when he loves us — well, well ; 
when we are sure of being loved for ever, believe me, mon- 
sieur, it is an effort to us and a reward to him ; but to any 
one else ! ” 

Madame Firmiani did not finish her sentence; she rose, 
bowed to the good gentleman, and vanished into her private 
rooms, where the sound of doors opened and shut in succes- 
sion had language to the ears of the poplar planter. 


272 


MADAME FIR MIAMI. 


“ Damn it ! ” said he to himself, “ what a woman ! She is 
either a very cunning hussy or an angel ; ” and he went down 
to his hired fly in the courtyard, where the horses were pawing 
the pavement in the silence. The coachman was asleep, after 
having cursed his customer a hundred times. 

Next morning, by about eight o’clock, the old gentleman 
was mounting the stairs of a house in the Rue de T Observance, 
where dwelt Octave de Camps. If there was in this world a 
man amazed, it was the young professor on seeing his uncle. 
The key was in the door, Octave’s lamp was still burning; he 
had sat up all night. 

“Now, you rascal,” said Monsieur de Bourbonne, seating 
himself in an armchair. “ How long has it been the fashion 
to make fools (speaking mildly) of uncles who have twenty- 
six thousand francs a year in good land in Touraine? and that 
when you are sole heir? Do you know that formerly such 
relations were treated with respect? Pray, have you any fault 
to find with me? Have I bungled my business as an uncle? 
Have I demanded your respect? Have I ever refused you 
money? Have I shut my door in your face, saying you had 
only come to see how I was? Have you not the most accom- 
modating, the least exacting uncle in France? — I will not say 
in Europe, it would be claiming too much. You write to me, 
or you don’t write. I live on your professions of affection. 
I am laying out the prettiest estate in the neighborhood, a place 
that is the object of envy in all the department ; but I do not 
mean to leave it you till the latest date possible — a weak- 
ness that is very pardonable. And my gentleman sells his 
property, is lodged like a groom, has no servants, keeps no 
style ” 

“ My dear uncle ” 

“ It is not a case of uncle, but of nephew. I have a right 
to your confidence ; so have it out all at once ; it is the easiest 
way, I know by experience. Have you been gambling? 
Have you been speculating on the Bourse? Come, say, 


MADAME FIRM/AN/. 


273 


‘ Uncle, I am a wretch/ and we kiss and are friends. But if 
you tell me any lie bigger than those I told at your age, I will 
sell my property, buy an annuity, and go back to the bad ways 
of my youth, if it is not too late.” 

“ Uncle ” 

“ I went last night to see your Madame Firmiani,” said the 
uncle, kissing the tips of all his fingers together. “ She is 
charming,” he went on. “ You have the King’s warrant and 
approval, and your uncle’s consent, if that is any satisfaction 
to you. As to the sanction of the church, that I suppose is 
unnecessary — the sacraments, no doubt, are too costly. Come ; 
speak out. Is it for her that you have ruined yourself?” 

“ Yes, uncle.” 

“ Ah ! the hussy 1 I would have bet upon it. In my day a 
woman of fashion could ruin a man more cleverly than any 
of your courtesans of to-day. I saw in her a resuscitation of 
the last century.” 

“ Uncle,” said Octave, in a voice that was at once sad and 
gentle, ‘‘you are under a mistake. Madame Firmiani de- 
serves your esteem, and all the adoration of her admirers.” 

‘- So hapless youth is always the same ! ” said Monsieur de 
Bourbonne. “Well, well ! go on in your own way; tell me 
all fine old stories once more. At the same time, you know, 
I dare say, that I am no chicken in such matters.” 

“ My dear uncle, here is a letter which will explain every- 
thing,” replied Octave, taking out an elegant letter-case — her 
gift, no doubt. “ When you have read it I will tell you the 
rest, and you will know Madame Firmiani as the world knows 
her not.” 

“I have not my spectacles with me,” said his uncle. 
“ Read it to me.” 

Octave began : “ ‘ My dear love ’ ” 

“ Then you are very intimate with this woman? ” 

“Why, yes, uncle.” 

“ And you have not quarreled ? ” 

18 


274 


MADAME FIRMIANI. 


“Quarreled!” echoed Octave in surprise. “We are 
married — at Gretna Green.” 

“ Well, then, why do you dine for forty sous ? ” 

“ Let me proceed.” 

“ Very true. I am listening.” 

Octave took up the letter again, and could not read certain 
passages without strong emotion. 

“ ‘ My beloved husband, you ask me the reason of my 
melancholy. Has it passed from my soul into my face, or 
have you only guessed it? And why should you not? Our 
hearts are so closely united. Besides, I cannot lie, though 
that perhaps is a misfortune. One of the conditions of being 
loved is, in a woman, to be always caressing and gay. Per- 
haps I ought to deceive you; but I would not do so, not 
even if it were to increase or to preserve the happiness you 
give me — you lavish on me — under which you overwhelm me. 
Oh, my dear, my love carries with it so much gratitude ! 
And I must love for ever, without measure. Yes, I must 
always be proud of you. Our glory — a woman’s glory — is all 
in the man she loves. Esteem, consideration, honor, are 
they not all his who has conquered everything? Well, and 
my angel has fallen. Yes, my dear, your last confession has 
dimmed my past happiness. From that moment I have felt 
myself humbled through you — you, whom I believed to be 
the purest of men, as you are the tenderest and most loving. 
I must have supreme confidence in your still childlike heart to 
make an avowal which costs me so dear. What, poor darling, 
your father stole his fortune, and you know it, and you keep 
it ! And you could tell me of this attorney’s triumph in a 
room full of the dumb witnesses of our love, and you are a 
gentleman, and you think yourself noble, and I am yours, 
and you are two-and-twenty ! How monstrous all through ! 

“ ‘ I have sought excuses for you ; I have ascribed your 
indifference to your giddy youth ; I know there is still much 
of the child in you. Perhaps you have never yet thought 


MADAME El AMI A AD. 


275 


seriously of what is meant by wealth, and by honesty. Oh, 
your laughter hurt me so much ! Only think, there is a 
family, ruined, always in grief, girls perhaps, who curse you 
day by day, an old man who says to himself every night, “I 
should not lack bread if Monsieur de Camps’ father had only 
been an honest man.” ’ ” 

“ What ! ” exclaimed Monsieur de Bourbonne, interrupting 
him, “ were you such an idiot as to tell that woman the story 
of your father’s affair with the Bourgneufs ? Women better 
understood spending a fortune than making one ” 

“ They understand honesty. Let me go on, uncle ! 

“ ‘Octave, no power on earth is authorized to garble the 
language of honor. Look into your conscience, and ask it by 
what name to call the action to which you owe your riches.’ ” 

And the nephew looked at his uncle, who bent his head. 

“ ‘ I will not tell you all the thoughts that beset me; they 
can all be reduced to one, which is this: I cannot esteem a 
man who knowingly soils himself for a sum of money whether 
large or small. Five francs stolen at play, or six times a 
hundred thousand francs obtained by legal trickery, disgrace 
a man equally. I must tell you all : I feel myself sullied by a 
love which till now was all my joy. From the bottom of my 
soul there comes a voice I cannot stifle. I have wept to find 
that my conscience is stronger than my love. You might 
commit a crime, and I would hide you in my bosom from 
human justice if I could ; but my devotion would go no 
farther. Love, my dearest, is, in a woman, the most un- 
limited confidence, joined to I know not what craving to 
reverence and adore the being to whom she belongs. I have 
never conceived of love but as a fire in which the noblest 
feelings were yet further purified — a fire which develops them 
to the utmost. 

“ ‘ I have but one thing more to say: Come to me poor, 
and I shall love you twice as much if possible ; if not, give 
me up. If I see you no more, I know what is left to me to do. 


276 


MADAME FIR A/1 AN/. 


“ ‘ But, now, understand me clearly, I will not have you 
make restitution because I desire it. Consult your conscience. 
This is an act of justice, and must not be done as a sacrifice 
to love. I am your wife, and not your mistress ; the point is 
not to please me, but to inspire me with the highest esteem. 
If I have misunderstood, if you have not clearly explained 
your father’s action, in short, if you can regard your fortune 
as legitimately acquired — and how gladly would I persuade 
myself that you deserve no blame — decide as the voice of 
conscience dictates ; act wholly for yourself. A man who 
truly loves, as you love me, has too high a respect for all the 
holy inspiration he may get from his wife to be dishonorable. 

“ ‘ I blame myself now for all I have written. A word 

would perhaps have been enough, and my preaching instinct 

has carried me awav. So I should like to be scolded — not 

* 

much, but a little. My dear, between you and me, are not 
you the power? You only should detect your own faults. 
Well, master mine, can you say I understand nothing about 
political discussion ? ’ 

“Well, uncle?” said Octave, whose eyes were full of tears. 

“ I see more writing, finish it.” 

“ Oh, there is nothing further but such things as only a 
lover may read.” 

“Very good,” said the old man. “Very good, my dear 
boy. I was popular with the women in my day; but I would 
have you to believe that I too have loved ; et ego in Arcadia. 
Still, I cannot imagine why you give lessons in mathematics.” 

“ My dear uncle, I am your nephew. Is not that as much 
as to say that I have made some inroads on the fortune left to 
me by my father? After reading that letter a complete revo- 
lution took place in me, in one instant I paid up the arrears 
of remorse. I could never describe to you the state in which 
I was. As I drove my cab to the Bois a voice cried to me, 
‘Is that horse yours?’ As I ate my dinner, I said to my- 
self, * Have you not stolen the food ? ’ I was ashamed of 


MADAME FIR MIA NI. 


277 


myself. My honesty was ardent in proportion to its youth. 
First I flew off to Madame Firmiani. Ah, my dear uncle, 
that day I had such joys of heart, such raptures of soul as were 
worth millions. With her I calculated how much I owed the 
Bourgneuf family ; and I sentenced myself, against Madame 
Firmiani’ s advice, to pay them interest at the rate of three per 
cent. But my whole fortune was not enough to refund the 
sum. We were both of us lovers enough — husband and wife 
enough — for her to offer and for me to accept her savings ” 

“ What, besides all her virtues, that adorable woman can 
save money ! ” cried the uncle. 

“ Do not laugh at her. Her position compels her to some 
thrift. Her husband went to Greece in 1820, and died about 
three years ago ; but to this day it has been impossible to get 
legal proof of his death, or to lay hands on the will he no 
doubt made in favor of his wife; this important document was 
stolen, lost, or mislaid in a country where a man’s papers are 
not kept as they are in France, nor is there a consul. So, 
not knowing whether she may not some day have to reckon 
with other and malignant heirs, she is obliged to be extremely 
careful, for she does not wish to have to give up her wealth as 
Chateaubriand has just given up the ministry. Now I mean 
to earn a fortune that shall be mine, so as to restore my wife 
to opulence if she should be ruined.” 

11 And you never told me — you never came to me. My 
dear nephew, believe me I love you well enough to pay your 
honest debts, your debts as a gentleman. I am the uncle of 
the fifth act — I will be revenged.” 

“I know your revenges, uncle; but let me grow rich by 
my own toil. If you wish to befriend me, allow me a thousand 
crowns a year until I need capital for some business. I declare 
at this moment I am so happy that all I care about is to live. 
I give lessons that I may be no burden on any one. 

“Ah, if you could but know with what delight I made 
restitution. After making some inquiries I found the Bourg- 


278 


MADAME DIR MIAMI. 


neufs in misery and destitution. They were living at Saint- 
Germain in a wretched house. The old father was manager 
in a lottery office ; the two girls did the work of the house 
and kept the accounts. The mother was almost always ill. 
The two girls are charming, but they have learned by bitter 
experience how little the world cares for beauty without for- 
tune. What a picture did I find there ! If I went to the 
house as the accomplice in a crime, I came out of it an honest 
man, and I have purged my father’s memory. I do not judge 
him, uncle ; there is in a lawsuit an eagerness, a passion which 
may sometimes blind the most honest man alive. Lawyers 
know how to legitimize the most preposterous claims ; there 
are syllogisms in law to humor the errors of conscience, and 
judges have a right to mistakes. My adventure was a 
perfect drama. To have played the part of Providence, to 
have fulfilled one of these hopeless wishes : ‘ If only twenty 
thousand francs a year could drop from heaven ! ’ — a wish we 
all have uttered in jest ; to see a sublime look of gratitude, 
amazement and admiration take the place of a glance fraught 
with curses ; to bring opulence into the midst of a family 
sitting round a turf-fire in the evening, by the light of a 
wretched lamp. No words can paint such a scene. My 
excessive justice to them seemed unjust. Well, if there be a 
paradise, my father must now be happy. As for myself, I am 
loved as man was never loved before. Madame Firmiani has 
given me more than happiness ; she has taught me a delicacy 
of feeling which perhaps I lacked. Indeed, I call her Dear 
Conscience, one of those loving names that are the outcome 
of certain secret harmonies of spirit. Honesty is said to pay ; 
I hope ere long to be rich myself ; at this moment I am bent 
on solving a great industrial problem, and if I succeed I shall 
make millions.” 

“ My boy, you have your mother’s soul,” said the old man, 
hardly able to restrain the tears that rose at the remembrance 
of his sister. 


MADAME FIR MIA NT. 


279 


At this instant, in spite of the height above the ground of 
Octave’s room, the young man and his uncle heard the noise 
of a carriage driving up. 

‘‘It is she ! I know her horses by the way they pull up.” 

And it was not long before Madame Firmiani made her 
appearance. 

“ Oh ! ” she cried, with an impulse of annoyance on seeing 
Monsieur de Bourbonne. “ But our uncle is not in the way,” 
she went on with a sudden smile. “ I have come to kneel at 
my husband’s feet and humbly beseech him to accept my 
fortune. I have just received from the Austrian embassy a 
document proving Firmiani’s death. The paper, drawn up 
by the kind offices of the Austrian envoy at Constantinople, 
is quite formal, and the will which Firmiani’s valet had in 
keeping for me is subjoined. There, you are richer than I 
am, for you have there,” and she tapped her husband’s breast, 
“treasures which only God can add to.” Then, unable to 
disguise her happiness, she hid her face in Octave’s bosom. 

“My sweet niece, we made love when I was young,” said 
the uncle, “ but now you love. You women are all that is 
good and lovely in humanity, for you are never guilty of your 
faults ; they always originate with us.” 

Paris, February, 1831. 





A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


(La Femme Abandonnee .) 

Translated by Ellen Marriage. 

To Her Grace the Duchess e d* Abr antes , 

Jrom her devoted servant , 

Honore de Balzac. 


Paris, August , 1835. 

In the early spring of 1822, the Paris doctors sent to 
Lower Normandy a young man just recovering from an 
inflammatory complaint, brought on by overstudy, or perhaps 
by excess of some other kind. His convalescence demanded 
complete rest, a light diet, bracing air, and freedom from 
excitement of every kind, and the fat lands of Bessin seemed 
to offer all these conditions of recovery. To Bayeux, a 
picturesque place about six miles from the sea, the patient 
therefore betook himself, and was received with the cordiality 
characteristic of relatives who lead very retired lives, and 
regard a new arrival as a godsend. 

All little towns are alike, save for a few local customs. 
When M. le Baron Gaston de Nueil, the young Parisian in 
question, had spent two or three evenings in his cousin’s 
house, or with the friends who made up Mme. de Sainte- 
Severe’s circle, he very soon had made the acquaintance of the 
persons whom this exclusive society considered to be “the 
whole town.” Gaston de Nueil recognized in them the invar- 
iable stock characters which every observer finds in every one 
of the many capitals of the little states which made up the 
France of an older day. 

First of all comes the family whose claims to nobility are 

( 280 ) 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


281 


regarded as incontestable, and of the highest antiquity in the 
department, though no one has so much as heard of them 
a bare fifty leagues away. This species of royal family on 
a small scale is distantly, but unmistakably, connected with 
the Navarreins and the Grandlieu family, and related to the 
Cadignans, and the Blamont-Chauvrys. The head of the 
illustrious house is invariably a determined sportsman. He 
has no manners, crushes everybody else with his nominal 
superiority, tolerates the sub-prefect much as he submits to the 
taxes, and declines to acknowledge any of the novel powers 
created by the nineteenth century, pointing out to you as a 
political monstrosity the fact that the prime minister is a man 
of no birth. His wife takes a decided tone, and talks in a 
loud voice. She has had adorers in her time, but takes the 
sacrament regularly at Easter. She brings up her daughters 
badly, and is of the opinion that they will always be rich 
enough with their name. 

Neither husband nor wife has the remotest idea of modern 
luxury. They retain a livery only seen elsewhere on the 
stage, and cling to old fashions in plate, furniture, and 
equipages, as in language and manner of life. This is a kind 
of ancient state, moreover, that suits passably well with pro- 
vincial thrift. The good folk are, in fact, the lords of the manor 
of a bygone age, minus the quit-rents and heriots, the pack of 
hounds and the laced coats ; full of honor among themselves, 
and one and all loyally devoted to princes whom they only 
see at a distance. The historical house incognito is as quaint 
a survival as a piece of ancient tapestry. Vegetating some- 
where among them there is sure to be an uncle or a brother, 
a lieutenant-general, an old courtier of the King, who wears 
the red ribbon of the order of Saint-Louis, and went to Han- 
over with the Marechal de Richelieu, and here you find him 
like a stray leaf out of some old pamphlet of the time of Louis 
Quinze. 

This fossil greatness finds a rival in another house, wealthier, 


282 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


though of less ancient lineage. Husband and wife spend a 
couple of months of every winter in Paris, bringing back 
with them its frivolous tone and short-lived contemporary 
crazes. Madame is a woman of fashion, though she looks 
rather conscious of her clothes, and is always behind the 
mode. She scoffs, however, at the ignorance affected by 
her neighbors. Her plate is of modern fashion ; she has 
“ grooms,” negroes, a valet-de-chambre, and what not. Her 
oldest son drives a tilbury, and does nothing (the estate is 
entailed upon him), his younger brother is auditor to a coun- 
cil of state. The father is well posted up in official scandals, 
and tells you anecdotes of Louis XVIII. and Mme. du Cayla. 
He invests his money in the five per cents., and is careful to 
avoid the topic of cider, but has been known occasionally to 
fall a victim to the craze for rectifying the conjectural sums- 
total of the various fortunes of the department. He is a 
member of the departmental council, has his clothes from 
Paris, and wears the cross of the Legion of Honor. In short, 
he is a country gentleman who has fully grasped the signifi- 
cance of the Restoration, and is coining money at the Cham- 
ber, but his Royalism is less pure than that of the rival house ; 
he takes the Gazette and the Debais , the other family only 
reads the Quotidienne. 

His lordship the bishop, a sometime vicar-general, fluctuates 
between the two powers, who pay him the respect due to 
religion, but at times they bring home to him the moral 
appended by the worthy La Fontaine to the fable of the “Ass 
laden with Relics.” The good man’s origin is distinctly 
plebeian. 

Then come stars of the second magnitude, men of family 
with ten or twelve hundred livres a year, captains in the navy 
or cavalry regiments, or nothing at all. Out on the roads, 
oh horseback, they rank half-way between the cure bearing 
the sacraments and the tax-collector on his rounds. Pretty 
nearly all of them have been in the Pages or in the Horse 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


283 


Guards, and now are peaceably ending their days in worthy 
manorial duties ; more interested in felling timber and the 
cider prospects than in the monarchy. 

Still they talk of the Charter and the Liberals while the 
cards are making, or over a game at backgammon, when they 
have exhausted the usual stock topic of dots , and have married 
everybody off according to the genealogies which they all 
know by heart. Their womenkind are haughty dames, who 
assume the airs of court ladies in their basket-chaises. They 
huddle themselves up in shawls and caps by way of full-dress ; 
and twice a year, after ripe deliberation, have a new bonnet 
from Paris, brought as opportunity offers. Exemplary wives 
are they for the most part, and garrulous. 

These are the principal elements of aristocratic gentility, 
with a few outlying old maids of good family, spinsters who 
have solved the problem: given a human being, to .remain 
absolutely stationary. They might be sealed up in the houses 
where you see them ; their faces and their dresses are literally 
part of the fixtures of the town, and the province in which 
they dwell. They are its tradition, its memory, its quintes- 
sence, the local genus incarnate. There is something frigid 
and monumental about these ladies ; they know exactly when 
to laugh and when to shake their heads, and every now and 
then giye out some utterance which passes current as a 
witticism. 

A few rich townspeople have crept into the miniature Fau- 
bourg Saint-Germain, thanks to their money or their aristo- 
cratic leanings. But despite their forty years, the circle still 
says of them, “ Young So-and-so has sound opinions,” and of 
such do they make deputies. As a general rule, the elderly 
spinsters are their principal patronesses, and not without 
comment. 

Finally, in this exclusive little set include two or three 
ecclesiastics, admitted for the sake of their cloth, or for their 
wit ; for these great nobles find their own society rather dull, 

W 


284 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


and introduce the bourgeois element into their drawing-rooms, 
as a baker puts leaven into his dough. 

The sum-total contained by all heads put together consists 
of a certain quantity of antiquated notions ; a few new reflec- 
tions brewed in company of an evening being added from 
time to time to the common stock. Like sea-water in a little 
creek, the phrases which represent these ideas surge up daily, 
punctually obeying the tidal laws of conversation in their 
flow and ebb ; you hear the hollow echo of yesterday, to-day, 
to-morrow, a year hence, and for evermore. On all things 
here below they pass immutable judgments, which go to make 
up a body of tradition into which no power of mortal man 
can infuse one drop of wit or sense. The lives of these per- 
sons revolve with the regularity of clockwork in an orbit of 
use and wont which admits of no more deviation or change 
than their opinions on matters religious, political, moral, or 
literary. 

If a stranger is admitted to the cenacle ,* every member of 
it in turn will say (not without a trace of irony), “You will 
not find the brilliancy of your Parisian society here/’ and pro- 
ceed forthwith to criticise the life led by his neighbors, as if 
he himself were an exception who had striven, and vainly 
striven, to enlighten the rest. But any stranger, so ill-advised 
as to concur in any of their freely expressed' criticism of each 
other, is pronounced at once to be an ill-natured person, a 
heathen, an outlaw, a reprobate Parisian “ as Parisians mostly 
are. 

Before Gaston de Nueil made his appearance in this little 
world of strictly observed etiquette, where every detail of 
life is an integrant part of a whole, and everything is known; 
where the values of personalty and real estate are quoted like 
stocks on the last sheet of the newspaper — before his arrival 
he had been weighed in the unerring scales of Bayeusaine 
judgment. 


* Guest-chamber. 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


285 


His cousin, Mme. de Sainte-Severe, had already given out 
the amount of his fortune, and the sum of his expectations, 
had produced the family tree, and expatiated on the talents, 
breeding, and modesty of this particular branch. So he re- 
ceived the precise amount of attention to which he was enti- 
tled ; he was accepted as a worthy scion of a good stock ; 
and, for he was but twenty-three, was made welcome without 
ceremony, though certain young ladies and mothers of daugh- 
ters looked not unkindly upon him. 

He had an income of eighteen thousand livres from land 
in the valley of the Auge ; and sooner or later his father, as 
in duty bound, would leave him the chateau of Manerville, with 
the lands thereunto belonging. As for his education, political 
career, personal qualities, and qualifications — no one so much 
as thought of raising the questions. His land was undeniable, 
his rentals steady ; excellent plantations had been made ; the 
tenants paid for repairs, rates, and taxes ; the apple-trees were 
thirty-eight years old ; and, to crown all, his father was in 
treaty for two hundred acres of woodland just outside the 
paternal park, which he intended to enclose with walls. No 
hopes of a political career, no fame on earth, can compare 
with such advantages as these. 

Whether out of malice or design, Mme. de Sainte-Severe 
omitted to mention that Gaston had an elder brother ; nor 
did Gaston himself say a word about him. But, at the same 
time, it is true that the brother was consumptive, and to all 
appearance would shortly be laid in earth, lamented and for- 
gotten. 

At first Gaston de Nueil amused himself at the expense of 
the circle. He drew, as it were, for his mental album, a series 
of portraits of these folk, with their angular, wrinkled faces 
and hooked noses, their crotchets and ludicrous eccentricities 
of dress, portraits which possessed all the racy flavor of truth. 
He delighted in their “ Normanisms,” in the primitive 
quaintness of their ideas and characters. For a short time 


286 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN 


he flung himself into their squirrel’s life of busy gyrations in a 
cage. Then he began to feel the want of variety, and grew 
tired of it. It was like the life of the cloister, cut short 

0 

before it had well begun. He drifted on till he reached a 
crisis, which is neither spleen nor disgust, but combines all 
the symptoms of both. When a human being is transplanted 
into an uncongenial soil, to lead a starved, stunted existence, 
there is always a little discomfort over the transition. Then, 
gradually, if nothing removes him from his surroundings, he 
grows accustomed to them, and adapts himself to the vacuity 
which grows upon him and renders him powerless. Even 
now, Gaston’s lungs were accustomed to the air; and he was 
willing to discern a kind of vegetable happiness in days that 
brought no mental exertion and no responsibilities. The 
constant stirring of the sap of life, the fertilizing influences 
of mind on mind, after which he had sought so eagerly in 
Paris, were beginning to fade from his memory, and he was 
in a fair way of becoming a fossil with these fossils, and end- 
ing his days among them, content, like the companions of 
Ulysses, in his gross envelope. 

One evening Gaston de Nueil was seated between a dowager 
and one of the vicars-general of the diocese, in a gray-paneled 
drawing-room, floored with large, white tiles. The family 
portraits which adorned the walls looked down upon four 
card-tables, and some sixteen persons gathered about them, 
chattering over their whist. Gaston, thinking of nothing, 
digesting one of those exquisite dinners to which the provin- 
cial looks forward all through the day, found himself justify- 
ing the customs of the country. 

fie began to understand why these good folk continued to 
play with yesterday’s pack of cards and shuffled them on a 
threadbare tablecloth, and how it was that they had ceased to 
dress for themselves or others. He saw the glimmerings of 
something like a philosophy in the even tenor of their per- 
petual round, in the calm of their methodical monotony, in 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


287 


their ignorance of the refinements of luxury. Indeed, he 
almost came to think that luxury profited nothing; and even 
now, the city of Paris, with its passions, storms, and pleasures, 
was scarcely more than a memory of childhood. 

He admired in all sincerity the red hands and shy, bashful 
manner of some young lady who at first struck him as an awk- 
ward simpleton, unattractive to the last degree, and surpass- 
ingly ridiculous. His doom was sealed. He had gone from 
the provinces to Paris ; he had led the feverish life of Paris ; 
and now he would have sunk back into the lifeless life of the 
provinces, but for a chance remark which reached his ear — a 
few words that called up a swift rush of such emotions as he 
might have felt when a strain of really great music mingles 
with the accompaniment of some tedious opera. 

“You went to call on Mme. de Beauseant yesterday, did 
you not?” The speaker was an elderly lady, and she ad- 
dressed the head of the local royal family. 

“ I went this morning. She was so poorly and depressed 
that I could not persuade her to dine with us to-morrow.” 

“With Mme. de Champignelles ? ” exclaimed the dowager, 
with something like astonishment in her manner. 

“With my wife,” calmly assented the noble. “Mme. de 
Beauseant is descended from the Blouse of Burgundy, on the 
spindle side, ’ tis true, but the name atones for everything. 
My wife is very much attached to the Vicomtesse, and the 
poor lady has lived alone for such a long while, that ” 

The Marquis de Champignelles looked round about him 
while he spoke with an air of cool unconcern, so that it was 
almost impossible to guess whether he made a concession to 
Mme. de Beauseant’s misfortunes or paid homage to her 
noble birth ; whether he felt flattered to receive her in his 
house, or, on the contrary, sheer pride was the motive that 
led him to try to force the country families to meet the 
Vicomtesse. 

The women appeared to take counsel of each other by a 


288 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


glance ; there was a sudden silence in the room, and it was 
felt that their attitude was one of disapproval. 

“Does this Mme. de Beauseant happen to be the lady 
whose adventure with M. d’Ajuda-Pinto made so much 
noise?” asked Gaston of his neighbor. 

“ The very same,” he was told. “ She came to Courcelles 
after the marriage of the Marquis d’Ajuda; nobody visits her. 
She has, besides, too much sense not to see that she is in a 
false position, so she has made no attempt to see any one. 
M. de Champignelles and a few gentlemen went to call upon 
her, but she would see none but M. de Champignelles, per- 
haps because he is a connection of the family. They are 
related through the Beauseants ; the father of the present 
Vicomte married a Mile, de Champignelles of the older 
branch. But though the Vicomtesse de Beauseant is supposed 
to be a descendant of the House of Burgundy, you can under- 
stand that we could not admit a wife separated from her hus- 
band into our society here. We are foolish enough still to 
cling to these old-fashioned ideas. There was the less excuse 
for the Vicomtesse, because M. de Beauseant is a well-bred 
man of the world, who would have been quite ready to listen 

to reason. But his wife is quite mad ” and so forth and 

so forth. 

M. de Nueil, still listening to the speaker’s voice, gathered 
nothing of the sense of the words; his brain was too full of 
thick-coming fancies. Fancies? What other name can you 
give to the alluring charms of an adventure that tempts the 
imagination and sets vague hopes springing up in the soul ; 
to the sense of coming events and mysterious felicity and fear 
at hand, while as yet there is no substance of fact on which 
these phantoms of caprice can fix and feed ? Over these fan- 
cies thought hovers, conceiving impossible projects, giving in 
the germ all the joys of love. Perhaps, indeed, all passion is 
contained in that thought-germ, as the beauty, and fragrance, 
and rich color of the flower are all packed in the seed. 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


289 


M. dc Nueil did not know that Mme. de Beaus£ant had 
taken refuge in Normandy, after a notoriety which women for 
the most part envy and condemn, especially when youth and 
beauty in some way excuse the transgression. Any sort of 
celebrity bestows an inconceivable prestige. Apparently for 
women, as for families, the glory of the crime effaces the stain ; 
and if such and such a noble house is proud of its tale of heads 
that have fallen on the scaffold, a young and pretty woman 
becomes more interesting for the. dubious renown of a happy 
love or a scandalous desertion, and the more she is to be 
pitied, the more she excites our sympathies. We are only 
pitiless to the commonplace. If, moreover, we attract all 
eyes, we are to all intents and purposes great ; how, indeed, 
are we to be seen unless we raise ourselves above other peo- 
ple’s heads? The common herd of humanity feels an invol- 
untary respect for any person who can rise above it, and is 
not over particular as to the means by which they rise. 

It may have been that some such motives influenced Gaston 
de Nueil at unawares, or perhaps it was curiosity, or a craving 
for some interest in his life; or, in a word, that crowd of 
inexplicable impulses which, for want of a better name, we are 
wont to call “ fatality,” that drew him to Mme. de BeausAant. 

The figure of the Vicomtesse de Beauseant rose up suddenly 
before him with gracious thronging associations. She was a 
new world for him, a world of fears and hopes, a world to 
fight for and to conquer. Inevitably he felt the contrast be- 
tween this vision and the human beings in the shabby room ; 
and then, in truth, she was a woman ; what woman had he 
seen so far in this dull, little world, where calculation replaced 
thought and feeling, where courtesy was a cut-and-dried for- 
mality, and ideas of the very simplest were too alarming to be 
received or to pass current ? The sound of Mme. de Beau- 
slant’s name revived a young man’s dreams and wakened 
urgent desires that had lain dormant for a little. 

Gaston de Nueil was absent-minded and preoccupied for the 
19 


290 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


rest of that evening. He was pondering how he might gain 
access to Mme. de Beauseant, and truly it was no very easy 
matter. She was believed to be extremely clever. But if 
men and women of parts may be captivated by something 
subtle or eccentric, they are also exacting, and can read all 
that lies below the surface ; and after the first step has been 
taken, the chances of failure and success in the difficult task 
of pleasing them are about even. In this particular case, 
moreover, the Vicomtesse, besides the pride of her position, 
had all the dignity of her name. Her utter seclusion was the 
least of the barriers raised between her and the world. For 
which reasons it was well-nigh impossible that a stranger, 
however well born, could hope for admittance ; and yet, the 
next morning found M. de Nueil taking his walks abroad in 
the direction of Courcelles, a dupe of illusions natural at his 
age. Several times he made the circuit of the garden walls, 
looking earnestly through every gap at the closed shutters or 
open windows, hoping for some romantic chance, on which 
he founded schemes for introducing himself into this unknown 
lady’s presence, without a thought of their impracticability. 
Morning after morning was spent in this way to mighty little 
purpose ; but with each day’s walk that vision of a woman 
living apart from the world, of love’s martyr buried in soli- 
tude, loomed larger in his thoughts, and was enshrined in his 
soul. So Gaston de Nueil walked under the walls of Cour- 
celles, and some gardener’s heavy footstep would set his heart 
beating high with hope. 

He thought of writing to Mme. de Beauseant, but, on 
mature consideration, what can you say to awomanwhom you 
have never seen, a complete stranger ? And Gaston had little 
self-confidence. Like most young persons with a plentiful 
crop of illusions still standing, he dreaded the mortifying 
contempt of silence more than death itself, and shuddered at 
the thought of sending his first tender epistle forth to face so 
many chances of being thrown into the fire. He was dis- 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


291 


tracted by innumerable conflicting ideas. But by dint of 
inventing chimeras, weaving romances, and cudgeling his 
brains, he hit at last upon one of the hopeful stratagems that 
are sure to occur to your mind if you persevere long enough, 
a stratagem which must make clear to the most inexperienced 
woman that here was a man who took a fervent interest in her. 
The caprice of social conventions puts as many barriers be- 
tween lovers as any Oriental imagination can devise in the 
most delightfully fantastic tale ; indeed, the most extravagant 
pictures are seldom exaggerations. In real life, as in the fairy 
tales, the woman belongs to him who can reach her and set 
her free from the position in which she languishes. The 
poorest of calenders that ever fell in love with the daughter 
of the Khalif is in truth scarcely farther from his lady than 
Gaston de Nueil from Mme. de Beauseant. The Vicomtesse 
knew absolutely nothing of M. de Nueil’s wanderings round 
her house ; Gaston de Nueil’s love grew to the height of the 
obstacles to overleap ; and the distance set between him and 
his extemporized lady-love produced the usual effect of dis- 
tance, in lending enchantment. 

One day, confident in his inspiration, he hoped everything 
from the love that must pour forth from his eyes. Spoken 
words, in his opinion, were more eloquent than the most pas- 
sionate letter; and, besides, he would engage feminine curi- 
osity to plead for him. He went, therefore, to M. de Cham- 
pignelles, proposing to employ that gentleman for the better 
success of his enterprise. He informed the Marquis that he 
had been intrusted with a delicate and important commission 
which concerned the Vicomtesse de Beauseant, that he felt 
doubtful whether she would read a letter written in an un- 
known handwriting, or put confidence in a stranger. Would 
M. de Champignelles, on his next visit, ask the Vicomtesse 
if she would consent to receive him — Gaston de Nueil ? 
While he asked the Marquis to keep his secret in case of a re- 
fusal, he very ingeniously insinuated sufficient reasons for his 


292 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


own admittance, to be duly passed on to the Vicomtesse. 
Was not M. de Champignelles a man of honor, a loyal gentle- 
man incapable of lending himself to any transaction in bad 
taste, nay, the merest suspicion of bad taste ! Love lends a 
young man all the self-possession and astute craft of an old 
ambassador ; all the Marquis’ harmless vanities were gratified, 
and the haughty grandee was completely duped. He tried 
hard to fathom Gaston’s secret ; but the latter, who would 
have been greatly perplexed to tell it, turned off" M. de 
Champignelles’ adroit questioning with a Norman’s shrewd- 
ness, till the Marquis, as a gallant Frenchman, complimented 
his young visitor upon his discretion. 

M. de Champignelles hurried off" at once to Courcelles, 
with that eagerness to serve a pretty woman which belongs to 
his time of life. In the Vicomtesse de Beauseant’s position such 
a message was likely to arouse keen curiosity ; so although her 
memory supplied no reason at all that could bring M. de Nueil 
to her house, she saw no objection to his visit — after some 
prudent inquiries as to his family and condition. At the 
same time, she began by a refusal. Then she discussed the 
propriety of the matter with M. de Champignelles, directing 
her questions so as to discover, if possible, whether he knew 
the motives for the visit, and finally revoked her negative 
answer. The careful discussion and the extreme discretion 
shown perforce by the Marquis had seriously piqued her 
curiosity. 

M. de Champignelles had no mind to cut a ridiculous 
figure. He said, with the air of a man who can keep another’s 
counsel, that the Vicomtesse must know the purpose of this 
visit perfectly well ; while the Vicomtesse, in all sincerity, 
had no notion what it could be. Mme. de Beauseant, in per- 
plexity, connected Gaston with people whom he had never 
met, went astray after various wild conjectures, and asked 
herself if she had seen this M. de Nueil before. In truth, no 
love letter, however sincere or skillfully indited, could have 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


293 


produced so much effect as this riddle. Again and again 
Mme. de Beauseant puzzled over it. 

When Gaston heard that he might call upon the Vicomtesse, 
his rapture at so soon obtaining the ardently longed-for good 
fortune was mingled with singular embarrassment. How was 
he to contrive a suitable sequel to this stratagem ? 

“Bah! I shall see her," he said over and over again to 
himself as he dressed. “See her, and that is everything ! ” 

He fell to hoping that once across the threshold of Cour- 
celles he should find an expedient for unfastening this Gordian 
knot of his own tying. There are believers in the omnipo- 
tence of necessity who never turn back ; the close presence 
of danger is an inspiration that calls out all their powers for 
victory. Gaston de Nueil was one of these. 

He took particular pains with his dress, imagining, as youth 
is apt to imagine, that success or failure hangs on the position 
of a curl, and ignorant of the fact that anything is charming 
in youth. And, in any case, such women as Mme. de Beau- 
seant are only attracted by the charms of wit or character of 
an unusual order. Greatness of character flatters their vanity, 
promises a great passion, seems to imply a comprehension of 
the requirements of their hearts. Wit amuses them, responds 
to the subtlety of their natures, and they think that they are 
understood. And what do all women wish but to be amused, 
understood, or adored ? It is only after much reflection on 
the things of life that we understand the consummate coquetry 
of neglect of dress and reserve at a first interview; and by 
the time we have gained sufficient astuteness for successful 
strategy, we are too old to profit by our experience. 

While Gaston’s lack of confidence in his mental equipment 
drove him to borrow charms from his clothes, Mme. de Beau- 
sdant herself was instinctively giving more attention to her 
toilet. 

“ I would rather not frighten people, at all events,” she said 
to herself as she arranged her hair. 


294 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


In M. de Nueil’s character, person, and manner there was 
that touch of unconscious originality which gives a kind of 
flavor to things that any one might say or do, and absolves 
everything that they may choose to do or say. Ke was highly 
cultivated, he had a keen brain, and a face, mobile as his own 
nature, which won the good-will of others. The promise of 
passion and tenderness in the bright eyes was fulfilled by an 
essentially kind heart. The resolution which he made as he 
entered the house at Courcelles was in keeping with his frank 
nature and ardent imagination. But, bold as he was with 
love, his heart beat violently when he had crossed the great 
court, laid out like an English garden, and the manservant, 
who had taken his name to the Vicomtesse, returned to say 
that she would receive him. 

“ M. le Baron de Nueil.” 

Gaston came in slowly, but with sufficient ease of manner ; 
and it is a more difficult thing, be it said, to enter a room 
where there is but one woman than a room that holds a 
score. 

A great fire was burning on the hearth in spite of the mild 
weather, and by the soft light of the candles in the sconces 
he saw a young woman sitting on a high-backed bergere in 
the angle by the hearth. The seat was so low that she could 
move her head freely ; every turn of it was full of grace and 
delicate charm, whether she bent, leaning forward, or raised 
and held it erect, slowly and languidly, as though it were a 
heavy burden, so low that she could cross her feet and let 
them appear, or draw them back under the folds of a long, 
black dress. 

The Vicomtesse made as if she would lay the book that she 
was reading on a small, round stand; but as she did so she 
turned towards M. de Nueil, and the volume, insecurely laid 
upon the edge, fell to the floor between the stand and the sofa. 
This did not seem to disconcert her. She looked up, bowing 
almost imperceptibly in response to his greeting, without rising 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


295 


from the depths of the low chair in which she lay. Bending 
forwards, she stirred the fire briskly, and stooped to pick up a 
fallen glove, drawing it mechanically over her left hand, 
while her eyes wandered in search of its fellow. The glance 
was instantly checked, however, for she stretched out a thin, 
white, all-but-transparent right hand, with flawless ovals of 
rose-colored nail at the tips of the slender, ringless fingers, 
and pointed to a chair as if to bid Gaston be seated. He 
sat down, and she turned her face questioningly towards him. 
Words cannot describe the subtlety of the winning charm 
and inquiry in that gesture ; deliberate in its kindliness, 
gracious yet accurate in expression, it was the outcome of 
early education and of a constant use and wont of the 
graciousness of life. Those movements of hers, so swift, so 
deft, succeeded each other so smoothly that Gaston de Nueil 
was fascinated by the blending of a pretty woman’s fastid- 
ious carelessness with the high-bred manner of a great lady. 

Mine, de Beauseant stood out in such strong contrast against 
the automatons among whom he had spent two months of 
exile in that out-of-the-world district of Normandy that he 
could not but find in her the realization of his romantic 
dreams ; and, on the other hand, he could not compare her 
perfections with those of other women whom he had form- 
erly admired. Here in her presence, in a drawing-room 
like some salon in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, full of 
costly trifles lying about upon the tables, and flowers and 
books, he felt as if he were back in Paris. It was a real Paris- 
ian carpet beneath his feet ; he saw once more the high-bred 
type of Parisienne, the fragile outlines of her form, her 
exquisite charm, her disdain of the studied effects which do 
so much to spoil provincial women. 

Mme. de Beauseant had fair hair and dark eyes, and the 
pale complexion that belongs to fair hair. She held up her 
brow nobly like some fallen angel, grown proud through the 
fall, disdainful of pardon. Her way of gathering her thick 


296 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


hair into a crown of plaits above the broad, curving lines of 
the bandeaux upon her forehead, added to the queenliness of 
her face. Imagination could discover the ducal coronet of 
Burgundy in the spiral threads of her golden hair ; all the 
courage of her house seemed to gleam from the great lady’s 
brilliant eyes, such courage as women use to repel audacity or 
scorn, for they were full of tenderness and gentleness. The 
outline of that little head, so admirably poised above the long, 
white throat, the delicate, fine features, the subtle curves of 
the lips, the mobile face itself, wore an expression of delicate 
discretion, a faint semblance of irony suggestive of craft and 
insolence. Yet it would have been difficult to refuse forgive- 
ness to those two feminine failings in her ; for the lines that 
came out in her forehead whenever her face was not in repose, 
like her upward glances (that pathetic trick of manner), told 
unmistakably of unhappiness, of a passion that had all but 
cost her her life. A woman, sitting in the great, silent salon, 
a woman cut off from the rest of the world in this remote 
little valley, alone, with the memories of her brilliant, happy, 
and impassioned youth, of continual gaiety and homage paid 
on all sides, now replaced by the horrors of the void — was 
there not something in the sight to strike awe that deepened 
with reflection ?. Consciousness of her own value lurked in 
her smile. She was neither wife nor mother, she was an out- 
law ; she had lost the one heart that could set her pulses beat- 
ing without shame ; she had nothing from without to support 
her reeling soul ; she must even look for strength from within, 
live her own life, cherish no hope save that of forsaken love, 
which looks forward to death’s coming, and hastens his lagging 
footsteps. And this while life was in its prime. Oh ! to feel 
destined for happiness and to die — never having given nor 
received it ! A woman too ! What pain was this ! These 
thoughts, flashing across M. de Nueil’s mind like lightning, 
left him very humble in the presence of the greatest charm 
with which woman can be invested. The triple aureole of 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN 


297 


beauty, nobleness, and misfortune dazzled him \ he stood in 
dreamy, almost open-mouthed admiration of the Vicomtesse. 
But he found nothing to say to her. 

Mme. de Beauseant, by no means displeased, no doubt, by 
his surprise, held out her hand with a kindly but imperious 
gesture \ then, summoning a smile to her pale lips, as if obey- 
ing, even yet, the woman’s impulse to be gracious — 

“ ^ have heard from M. de Champignelles of a message 
which you have kindly undertaken to deliver, monsieur,” she 
said. “ Can it be from ” 

With that terrible phrase Gaston understood, even more 
clearly than before, his own ridiculous position, the bad taste 
and bad faith of his behavior towards a woman so noble and 
so unfortunate. He reddened. The thoughts that crowded 
in upon him could be read in his troubled eyes ; but suddenly, 
with the courage which youth draws from a sense of its own 
wrong-doing, he gained confidence, and very humbly inter- 
rupted Mme. de Beauseant. 

“Madame,” he faltered out, “I do not deserve the happi- 
ness of seeing you. I have deceived you basely. However 
strong the motive may have been, it can never excuse the 
pitiful subterfuge which I used to gain my end. But, madame, 
if your goodness will permit me to tell you ” 

The Vicomtesse glanced at M. de Nueil, haughty disdain 
in her whole manner. She stretched her hand to the bell 
and rang it. 

“Jacques,” she said, “light this gentleman to the door,” 
and she looked with dignity at the visitor. 

She rose proudly, bowed to Gaston, and then stooped for 
the fallen volume. If all her movements on his entrance had 
been caressingly dainty and gracious, her every gesture now 
was no less severely frigid. M. de Nueil rose to his feet, but 
he stood waiting. Mme. de Beauseant flung another glance 
at him. “ Well, why do you not go ? ” she seemed to say. 

There was such cutting irony in that glance that Gaston 


298 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


grew white as if he were about to faint. Tears came into his 
eyes, but he would not let them fall, and scorching shame and 
despair dried them. He looked back at Mme. de Beauseant, 
and a certain pride and consciousness of his own worth was 
mingled with his humility ; the Vicomtesse had a right to 
punish him, but ought she to use her right ? Then he went 
out. 

As he crossed the ante-chamber, a clear head and wits 
sharpened by passion were not slow to grasp the danger of 
his situation. 

“ If I leave this house, I can never come back to it again,” 
he said to himself. ‘‘The Vicomtesse will always think of 
me as a fool. It is impossible that a woman, and such a 
woman, should not guess the love that she has called forth. 
Perhaps she feels a little, vague, involuntary regret for dis- 
missing me so abruptly. But she could not do otherwise, 
and she cannot recall her sentence. It rests with me to un- 
derstand her.” 

At that thought Gaston stopped short on the flight of steps 
with an exclamation; he turned sharply, saying, “I have 
forgotten something,” and went back to the salon. The 
lackey, all respect for a baron and the rights of property, was 
completely deceived by the natural utterance, and followed 
him. Gaston returned quietly and unannounced. The Vicom- 
tesse, thinking that the intruder was the servant, looked up 
and beheld M. de Nueil. 

“Jacques lighted me to the door,” he said, with a half-sad 
smile which dispelled any suspicion of jest in those words, 
while the tone in which they were spoken went to the heart. 
Mme. de Beauseant was disarmed. 

“ Very well, take a seat,” she said. 

Gaston eagerly took possession of a chair. His eyes were 
shining with happiness; the Vicomtesse, unable to endure 
the brilliant light in them, looked down at the book. She 
was enjoying a delicious, ever-new sensation ; the sense of a 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


299 


man’s delight in her presence is an unfailing feminine instinct. 
And then, besides, he had divined her, and a woman is so 
grateful to the man who has mastered the apparently capri- 
cious, yet logical, reasoning of her heart ; who can track 
her thought through the seemingly contradictory workings of 
her mind, and read the sensations, or shy or bold, written 
in fleeting red, a bewildering maze of coquetry and self- 
revelation. 

“ Madame,” Gaston exclaimed in a low voice, “my blun- 
der you know, but you do not know how much I am to 
blame. If you only knew what joy it was to ” 

“ Ah ! take care,” she said, holding up one finger with an 
air of mystery, as she put out her hand towards the bell. 

The charming gesture, the gracious threat, no doubt, called 
up some sad thought, some memory of the old happy time 
when she could be wholly charming and gentle without an 
after-thought ; when the gladness of her heart justified every 
caprice, and put charm into every least movement. The 
lines in her forehead gathered between her brows, and the ex- 
pression of her face grew dark in the soft candle-light. Then 
looking across at M. de Nueil gravely but not unkindly, she 
spoke like a woman who deeply feels the meaning of every 
word. 

“This is all very ridiculous! Once upon a time, mon- 
sieur, when thoughtless high spirits were my privilege, I 
should have laughed fearlessly over your visit with you. But 
now mv life is very much changed. I cannot do as I like, I 
am obliged to think. What brings you here? Is it curi- 
osity ? In that case I am paying dearly for a little fleeting 
pleasure. Have you fallen passionately in love already with a 
woman whom you have never seen, a woman with whose 
name slander has, of course, been busy ? If so, your motive 
in making this visit is based on disrespect, on an error which 
accident brought into notoriety.” 

She flung her book down scornfully upon the table, then, 


300 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


with a terrible look at Gaston, she went on : “ Because I 
once was weak, must it be supposed that I am always weak ? 
This is horrible, degrading. Or have you come here to pity 
me ? You are very young to offer sympathy with heart 
troubles. Understand this clearly, sir, that I would rather 
have scorn than pity. I will not endure compassion from any 
one.” 

There was a brief pause. 

“Well, sir,” she continued (and the face that she turned 
to him was gentle and sad), “ whatever motive induced this 
rash intrusion upon my solitude, it is very painful to me, you 
see. You are too young to be totally without good feeling, 
so surely you will feel that this behavior of yours is im- 
proper. I forgive you for it, and, as you see, I am speaking 
of it to you without bitterness. You will not come here 
again, will you? I am entreating when I might command. 
If you come to see me again, neither you nor I can prevent 
the whole place from believing that you are my lover, and you 
would cause me great additional annoyance. You do not 
mean to do that, I think.” 

She said no more, but looked at him with a great dignity 
which abashed him. 

“I have done wrong, madame,” he said, with deep feeling 
in his voice, “ but it was through enthusiasm and thought- 
lessness and eager desire of happiness, the qualities and de- 
fects of my age. Now, I understand that I ought not to 
have tried to see you,” he added ; “but, at the same time, 
the desire was a very natural one ” — and making an appeal to 
feeling rather than to the intellect, he described the weariness 
of his enforced exile. He drew a portrait of a young man 
in whom the fires of life were burning themselves out, con- 
veying the impression that here was a heart worthy of tender 
love, a heart which, notwithstanding, had never known the 
joys of love for a young and beautiful woman of refinement 
and taste. He explained, without attempting to justify, his 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


301 


unusual conduct. He flattered Mme. de Beauseant by show- 
ing that she had realized for him the ideal lady of a young 
man’s dream, the ideal sought by so many, and so often 
sought in vain. Then he touched upon his morning prowl- 
ings under the walls of Courcelles, and his wild thoughts at 
the first sight of the house, till he excited that vague feeling 
of indulgence which a woman can find in her heart for the 
follies committed for her sake. 

An impassioned voice was speaking in the chill solitude ; 
the speaker brought with him a warm breath of youth and the 
charms of a carefully cultivated mind. It was so long since 
Mme. de Beauseant had felt stirred by real feeling delicately 
expressed, that it affected her very strongly now. In spite of 
herself, she watched M. de Nueil’s expressive face, and ad- 
mired the noble confidence of a soul, unbroken as yet by the 
cruel discipline of the life of the world, unfretted by con- 
tinual scheming to gratify personal ambition and vanity. 
Gaston was in the flower of his youth, he impressed her as a 
man with something in him, unaware as yet of the great 
career that lay before him. So both these two made reflec- 
tions most dangerous for their peace of mind, and both strove 
to conceal their thoughts. M. de Nueil saw in the Vicom- 
tesse a rare type of woman, always the victim of her perfec- 
tion and tenderness ; her graceful beauty is the least of her 
charms for those who are privileged to know the infinite of 
feeling and thought and goodness in the soul within ; a 
woman, whose instinctive feeling for beauty runs through all 
the most varied expressions of love, purifying its transports, 
turning them to something almost holy ; wonderful secret of 
womanhood, the exquisite gift that nature so seldom bestows. 
And the Vicomtesse, on her side, listening to the ring of 
sincerity in Gaston’s voice, while he told of his youthful 
troubles, began to understand all that grown children of five- 
and-twenty suffer from diffidence, when hard work has kept 
them alike from corrupting influences and intercourse with 


302 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


men and women of the world whose sophistical reasoning and 
experience destroy the fair qualities of youth. Here was the 
ideal of women’s dreams, a man unspoiled as yet by the 
egoism of family or success, or bv that narrow selfishness 
which blights the first impulses of honor, devotion, self-sacri- 
fice, and high demands of self ; all the flowers so soon wither 
that enrich at first the life of delicate but strong emotions, 
and keep alive the loyalty of the heart. 

But these two, once launched forth on the vast sea of senti- 
ment, went far indeed in theory, sounding the depths in 
either soul, testing the sincerity of their expressions ; only, 
whereas Gaston’s experiments were made unconsciously, Mme. 
de Beauseant had a purpose in all that she said. Bringing 
her natural and acquired subtlety to the work, she sought to 
learn M. de Nueil’s opinions by advancing, as far as she 
could do so, views diametrically opposed to her own. So witty 
and so gracious was she, so much herself with this stranger, 
with whom she felt completely at ease, because she felt sure 
that they should never meet again, that, after some delicious 
epigram of hers, Gaston exclaimed unthinkingly — 

“ Oh ! madame, how could any man have left you?” 

The Vicomtesse was silent. Gaston reddened, he thought 
that he had offended her ; but she was not angry. The first 
deep thrill of delight since the day of her calamity had taken 
her by surprise. The skill of the cleverest roue could not 
have made the impression that M. de Nueil made with that 
cry from the heart. That verdict wrung from a young man’s 
candor gave her back innocence in her own eyes, condemned 
the world, laid the blame upon the lover who had left her, 
and justified her subsequent solitary drooping life. The 
world’s absolution, the heartfelt sympathy, the social esteem 
so longed for, and so harshly refused, nay, all her secret 
desires were given her to the full in that exclamation, made 
fairer yet by the heart’s sweetest flatteries and the admiration 
that women alw’ays relish eagerly. He understood her, un- 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


303 


derstood all, and be had given her, as if it were the most 
natural thing in the world, the opportunity of rising higher 
through her fall. She looked at the clock. 

“ Ah ! madame, do not punish me for my heedlessness. If 
you grant me but one evening, vouchsafe not to shorten it, I 
pray you.” 

She smiled at the pretty speech. 

“Well, as we must never meet again,” she said, “what sig- 
nifies a moment more or less ? If you were to care for me, 
it would be a pity.” 

“ It is too late now,” he said. 

“Do not tell me that,” she answered gravely. “Under 
any other circumstances I should be very glad to see you. I 
will speak frankly, and you will understand how it is that 
I do not choose to see you again, and ought not to do so. 
You have too much magnanimity not to feel that if I were so 
much as suspected of a second trespass, every one would think 
of me as a contemptible and vulgar woman ; I should be like 
other women. A pure and blameless life will bring my char- 
acter into relief. I am too proud not to endeavor to live like 
one apart in the world, a victim of the law through my mar- 
riage, man’s victim through my love. If I were not faithful 
to the position which I have taken up, then I should deserve 
all the reproach that is heaped upon me ; I should be lowered 
in my own eyes. I had not enough lofty social virtue to 
remain with a man whom I did not love. I have snapped the 
bonds of marriage in spite of the law ; it was wrong, it was a 
crime, it was anything you like, but for me the bonds meant 
death. I meant to live. Perhaps if I had been a mother I 
could have endured the torture of a forced marriage of suita- 
bility. At eighteen we scarcely know what is done with us, 
poor girls that we are ! I have broken the laws of the world, 
and the world has punished me ; we both did rightly. I 
sought happiness. Is it not a law of our nature to seek for 
happiness? I was young, I was beautiful. I thought that I 


304 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


had found a nature as loving, as apparently passionate. I was 
loved indeed; for a little while ” 

She paused. 

“ I used to think,” she said, “ that no one could leave a 
woman in such a position as mine. I have been forsaken ; I 
must have offended in some way. Yes, in some way, no 
doubt, I failed to keep some law of our nature, was too lov- 
ing, too devoted, too exacting — I do not know. Evil days 
have brought light with them ? For a long while I blamed 
another, now I am content to bear the whole blame. At my 
own expense, I have absolved that other of whom I once 
thought I had a right to complain. I had not the art to keep 
him ; fate has punished me heavily for my lack of skill. I 
only knew how to love ; how can one keep one’s self in mind 
when one loves ? So I was a slave when I should have sought 
to be a tyrant. Those who know me may condemn me, but 
they will respect me too, Pain has taught me that I must not 
lay myself open to this a second time. I cannot understand 
how it is that I am living yet, after the anguish of that first 
week of the most fearful crisis in a woman’s life. Only from 
three years of loneliness would it be possible to draw strength 
to speak of that time as I am speaking now. Such agony, 
monsieur, usually ends in death ; but this — well, it was the 
agony of death with no tomb to end it. Oh ! I have known 
pain indeed ! ” 

The Vicomtesse raised her beautiful eyes to the ceiling ; 
and the cornice, no doubt, received all the confidences which 
a stranger might not hear. When a woman is afraid to look 
at her interlocutor, there is in truth no gentler, meeker, more 
accommodating confidante than the cornice. The cornice is 
quite an institution in the boudoir; what is it but the con- 
fessional, minus the priest ? 

Mme. de Beaus£ant was eloquent and beautiful at that 
moment ; nay, “coquettish,” if the word were not too heavy. 
By justifying herself, by raising insurmountable barriers be- 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


305 


tween herself and love, she was stimulating every sentiment 
in the man before her; nay, more, the higher she set the 
goal, the more conspicuous it grew. At last, when her eyes 
had lost the too eloquent expression given to them by painful 
memories, she let them fall on Gaston. 

“ You acknowledge, do you not, that I am bound to find a 
solitary, self-contained life? ” she said quietly. 

So sublime was she in her reasoning and her madness that 
M. de Nueil felt a wild longing to throw himself at her feet ; 
but he was afraid of making himself ridiculous, so he held his 
enthusiasm and his thoughts in check. He was afraid, too, 
that he might totally fail to express them, and in no less terror 
of some awful rejection on her part, or of her mockery, an ap- 
prehension which strikes like ice to the most fervid soul. 
The revulsion which led him to crush down every feeling 
as it sprang up in his heart cost him the intense pain that 
diffident and ambitious natures experience in the frequent 
crises when they are compelled to stifle their longings. And 
yet, in spite of himself, he broke the silence to say in a falter- 
ing voice — 

“ Madame, permit me to give way to one of the strongest 
emotions of my life, and own to all that you have made me 
feel. You set the heart in me swelling high ! I feel within 
me a longing to make you forget your mortifications, to de- 
vote my life to this, to give you love for all who have ever 
given you wounds or hate. But this is a very sudden out- 
pouring of the heart, nothing can justify it to-day, and I 
ought not ” 

“ Enough, monsieur,” said Mme. de Beauseant ; “ we have 
both of us gone too far. By giving you the sad reasons for a 
refusal which I am compelled to give, I meant to soften it and 
not to elicit homage. Coquetry only suits a happy woman. 
Believe me, we must remain strangers to each other. At a 
later day you will know that ties which must inevitably be 
broken ought not to be formed at all.” 

20 


306 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


She sighed lightly, and her brows contracted, but almost 
immediately grew clear again. 

“ How painful it is for a woman to be powerless to follow 
the man she loves through all the phases of his life ! And if 
that man loves her truly, his heart must surely vibrate with 
pain to the deep trouble in hers. Are they not twice un- 
happy ? ’ ’ 

There was a short pause. Then she rose smiling. 

“You little suspected, when you came to Courcelles, that 
you were to hear a sermon, did you? ” 

Gaston felt even farther than at first from this extraordinary 
woman. Was the charm of that delightful hour due after all 
to the coquetry of the mistress of the house ? She had been 
anxious to display her wit. He bowed stiffly to the Vicom- 
tesse, and went away in desperation. 

On the way home he tried to detect the real character of a 
creature supple and hard as a steel spring; but he had seen her 
pass through so many phases, that he could not make up his 
mind about her. The tones of her voice, too, were ringing 
in his ears ; her gestures, the little movements of her head, 
and the varying expression of her eyes grew more gracious 
in memory, more fascinating as he thought of them. The 
Vicomtesse’s beauty shone out again for him in the darkness; 
his reviving impressions called up yet others, and he was en- 
thralled anew by womanly charm and wit, which at first he 
had not perceived. He fell to wandering musings, in which 
the most lucid thoughts grow refractory and flatly contradict 
each other, and the soul passes through a brief frenzy fit. 
Youth only can understand all that lies in the dithyrambic 
outpourings of youth when, after a stormy siege of the most 
frantic folly and coolest commonsense, the heart finally yields 
to the assault of the latest comer, be it hope or despair, as 
some mysterious power determines. 

At three-and-twenty, diffidence nearly always rules a man’s 
conduct ; he is perplexed with a young girl’s shyness, a girl’s 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


307 


trouble ; he is afraid lest he should illy express his love, sees 
nothing but difficulties, and takes alarm at them ; he would 
be bolder if he loved less, for he has no confidence in himself, 
and with a growing sense of the cost of happiness comes a 
conviction that the woman he loves cannot easily be won ; 
perhaps, too, he is giving himself up too entirely to his own 
pleasure, and fears that he can give none ; and when, for his 
misfortune, his idol inspires him with awe, he worships in 
secret and afar, and, unless his love is guessed, it dies away. 
Then it often happens that one of these dead early loves 
lingers on, bright with illusions in many a young heart. 
What man is there but keeps within him these virgin mem- 
ories that grow fairer every time they rise before him, mem- 
ories that hold up to him the ideal of perfect bliss? Such 
recollections are like children who die in the flower of child- 
hood, before their parents have known anything of them but 
their smiles. 

So M. de Nueil came home from Courcelles, the victim of a 
mood fraught with desperate resolutions. Even now he felt 
that Mme. de Beauseant was one of the conditions of his 
existence, and that death would be preferable to life without 
her. He was still young enough to feel the tyrannous fasci- 
nation which fully developed womanhood exerts over immature 
and impassioned natures; and, consequently, he was to spend 
one of those stormy nights when a young man’s thoughts 
travel from happiness to suicide and back again — nights in 
which youth rushes through a lifetime of bliss and falls asleep 
from sheer exhaustion. Fateful nights are they, and the worst 
misfortune that can happen is to awake a philosopher after- 
wards. M. de Nueil was far too deeply in love to sleep ; he 
rose and betook to inditing letters, but none of them were 
satisfactory, and he burned them all. 

The next day he went to Courcelles to make the circuit of 
her garden walls, but he waited till nightfall ; he was afraid 
that she might see him. The instinct that led him to act in 


308 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


this way arose out of so obscure a mood of the soul, that none 
but a young man, or a man in like case, can fully understand 
its mute ecstasies and its vagaries, matter to set those people 
who are lucky enough to see life only in its matter-of-fact 
aspect shrugging their shoulders. After painful hesitation, 
Gaston wrote to Mine, de Beaus£ant. Here is the letter, 
which may serve as a sample of the epistolary style pecu- 
liar to lovers, a performance which, like the drawings prepared 
with great secrecy by children for the birthdays of father or 
mother, is found to be insufferable by every mortal except the 
recipients : 

“ Madame : — Your power over my heart, my soul, myself, 
is so great that my fate depends wholly upon you to-day. 
Do not throw this letter into the fire ; be so kind as to read it 
through. Perhaps you may pardon the opening sentence 
when you see that it is no commonplace, selfish declaration, 
but that it expresses a simple fact. Perhaps you may feel 
moved, because I ask for so little, by the submission of one 
who feels himself so much beneath you, by the influence that 
your decision will exercise upon my life. At my age, madame, 
I only know how to love, I am utterly ignorant of ways of 
attracting and winning a woman’s love, but in my own heart 
I know raptures of adoration of her. I am irresistibly drawn 
to you by the great happiness that I feel through you ; my 
thoughts turn to you with the selfish instinct which bids us 
draw nearer to the fire of life when we find it. I do not 
imagine that I am worthy of you ; it seems impossible that I, 
young, ignorant, and shy, could bring you one-thousandth 
part of the happiness that I drink in at the sound of your 
voice and the sight of you. For me you are the only woman 
in the world. I cannot imagine life without you, so I have 
made up my mind to leave France, and to risk my life till I 
lose it in some desperate enterprise, in the Indies, in Africa, I 
care not where. How can I quell a love that knows no limits 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


309 


save by opposing to it something as infinite? Yet, if you 
will allow me to hope, not to be yours, but to win your friend- 
ship, I will stay. Let me come, not so very often, if you 
require it, to spend a few such hours with you as those stolen 
hours of yesterday. The keen delight of that brief happiness, 
to be cut short at the least over-ardent word from me, will 
suffice to enable me to endure the boiling torrent in my veins. 
Have I presumed too much upon your generosity by this 
entreaty to suffer an intercourse in which all the gain is mine 
alone? You could find ways of showing the world, to which 
you sacrifice so much, that I am nothing to you ; you are so 
clever and so proud ! What have you to fear ? If I could 
only lay bare my heart to you at this moment, to convince 
you that it is with no lurking after-thought that I make this 
humble request ! Should I have told you that my love was 
boundless, while I prayed you to grant me friendship, if I 
had any hope of your sharing this feeling in the depths of 
my soul ? No, while I am with you, I will be whatever you 
will, if only I may be with you. If you refuse (as you have 
the power to refuse), I will not utter one murmur, I will go. 
And if, at a later day, any other woman should enter into 
my life, you will have proof that you were right ; but if I 
am faithful till death, you may feel some regret perhaps. The 
hope of causing you a regret will soothe my agony, and that 
thought shall be the sole revenge of a slighted heart.” 

Only those who have passed through all the exceeding tribu- 
lations of youth, who have seized on all the chimeras with two 
white pinions, the nightmare fancies at the disposal of a fervid 
imagination, can realize the horrors that seized upon Gaston 
de Nueil when he had reason to suppose that his ultimatum 
was in Mme. de Beaus6ant’s hands. He saw the Vicomtesse, 
wholly untouched, laughing at his letter and his love, as those 
can laugh who have ceased to believe in love. He could 
have wished to have his letter back again. It was an absurd 


310 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


letter. There were a thousand and one tilings, now that he 
came to think of it, that lie might have said, tilings infinitely 
better and more moving than those stilted phrases of his ? 
those accursed, sophisticated, pretentious, fine-spun phrases, 
though, luckily, the punctuation had been pretty bad, and the 
lines shockingly crooked. He tried not to think, not to feel ; 
but he felt and thought, and was wretched. If he had been 
thirty years old, he might have gotten drunk, but the innocent 
of three-and-twenty knew nothing of the resources of opium 
nor of the expedients of advanced civilization. Nor had he 
at hand one of those good friends of the Parisian pattern who 
understand so well how to say Pcele , non dolet ! by producing 
a bottle of champagne, or alleviate the agony of suspense by 
carrying you off somewhere to make a night of it. Capital 
fellows are they, always in low water when you are in funds, 
always off to some watering-place when you go to look them 
up, always with some bad bargain in horseflesh to sell you; it 
is true, that when you want to borrow of them, they have 
always just lost their last louis at play ; but in all other re- 
spects they are the best fellows on earth, always ready to 
embark with you on one of the steep down-grades where you 
lose your time, your soul and your life ! 

At length M. de Nueil received a missive through the instru- 
mentality of Jacques, a letter that bore the arms of Burgundy 
on the scented seal, a letter written on vellum note-paper. 

He rushed away at once to lock himself in, and read and 
re-read her letter. 

“You are punishing me very severely, monsieur, both for 
the friendliness of my effort to spare you a rebuff, and for the 
attraction which intellect always has for me. I put confidence 
in the generosity of youth, and you have disappointed me. 
And yet, if I did not speak unreservedly (which would have 
been perfectly ridiculous), at any rate I spoke frankly of my 
position, so that you might imagine that I was not to be 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


311 


touched by a young soul. My distress is the keener for my 
interest in you. I am naturally tender-hearted and kindly, but 
circumstances force me to act unkindly. Another woman 
would have flung your letter, unread, in the Are ; I read it, 
and I am answering it. My answer will make it clear to you 
that while I am not untouched by the expression of this feel- 
ing which I have inspired, albeit unconsciously, I am still far 
from sharing it, and the step which I am about to take will 
show you still more plainly that I mean what I say. I wish, 
besides, to use, for your welfare, that authority, as it were, 
which you give me over your life ; and I desire to exercise it 
this once to draw aside the veil from your eyes. 

“I am nearly thirty years old, monsieur; you are barely 
two-and-tvventy. You yourself cannot know what your 
thoughts will be at my age. The vows that you make so 
lightly to-day may seem a very heavy burden to you then. 
I am quite willing to believe that at this moment you 
would give me your whole life without a regret, you would 
even be ready to die for a little brief happiness; but at 
the age of thirty experience will take from you the very 
power of making daily sacrifices for my sake, and I myself 
should feel deeply humiliated if I accepted them. A day 
would come when everything, even nature, would bid you 
leave me, and I have already told you that death is pref- 
erable to desertion. Misfortune has taught me to calculate ; 
as you see, I am arguing perfectly dispassionately. You 
force me to tell you that I have no love for you ; I ought 
not to love, I cannot, and I will not. It is too late to yield, 
as women yield, to a blind unreasoning impulse of the heart, 
too late to be the mistress whom you seek. My consolations 
spring from God, not from earth. Ah, and besides, with the 
melancholy insight of disappointed love, I read hearts too 
clearly to accept your proffered friendship. It is only in- 
stinct. I forgive the boyish ruse, for which you are not 
responsible as yet. In the name of this passing fancy of 


312 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


yours, for the sake of your career and my own peace of mind, 
I bid you stay in your own country; you must not spoil a 
fair and honorable life for an illusion which, by its very na- 
ture, cannot last. At a later day, when you have accom- 
plished your real destiny, in the fully developed manhood 
that awaits you, you will appreciate this answer of mine, 
though to-day it may be that you blame its hardness. You 
will turn with pleasure to an old woman whose friendship will 
certainly be sweet and precious to you then ; a friendship 
untried by the extremes of fashion and the disenchanting 
processes of life ; a friendship which noble thoughts and 
thoughts of religion will keep pure and sacred. Farewell ; 
do my bidding with the thought that your success will bring 
a gleam of pleasure into my solitude, and only think of me 
as we think of absent friends.” 

Gaston de Nueil read the letter, and wrote the following 
lines : 

“ Madame : — If I could cease to love you, to take the chances 
of becoming an ordinary man which you hold out to me, you 
must admit that I should thoroughly deserve my fate. No, I 
shall not do as you bid me ; the oath of fidelity which I swear 
to you shall only be absolved by death. Ah ! take my life, 
unless indeed you do not fear to carry a remorse all through 
your own ” 

When the man returned from his errand, M. de Nueil asked 
him with whom he left the note ? 

‘*1 gave it to Mme. le Vicomtesse herself, sir; she was in 
her carriage and just about to start.” 

“ For the town ? ” 

“ I don’t think so, sir. Mme. la Vicomtesse had post- 
horses.” 

“ Ah ! then she is going away,” said the Baron. 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


313 


“ Yes, sir,” the man answered. 

Gaston de Nueil at once prepared to follow Mme. de Beau- 
s6ant. She led the way as far as Geneva, without a suspicion 
that he followed. And he ? Amid the many thoughts that 
assailed him during that journey, one all-absorbing problem 
filled his mind — “ Why did she go away? ” Theories grew 
thickly on such ground for supposition, and naturally he in- 
clined to the one that flattered his hopes — “ If the Vicomtesse 
cares for me, a clever woman would, of course, choose Swit- 
zerland, where nobody knows either of us, in preference to 
France, where she would find censorious critics.” 

An impassioned lover of a certain stamp would not feel 
attracted to a woman clever enough to choose her own ground ; 
such women are too clever. However, there is nothing to 
prove that there was any truth in Gaston’s supposition. 

The Vicomtesse took a small house by the side of the lake. 
As soon as she was installed in it, Gaston came one summer 
evening in the twilight. Jacques, that flunkey in grain, 
showed no sign of surprise, and announced “M. le Baron de 
Nueil” like a discreet domestic well acquainted with good 
society. At the sound of the name, at the sight of its owner, 
Mme. de Beauseant let her book fall from her hands ; her sur- 
prise gave him time to come close to her, and to say in tones 
that sounded like music in her ears — 

“What joy it was to me to take the horses that brought 
you on this journey ! ” 

To have the inmost desires of the heart so fulfilled ! Where 
is the woman who could resist such happiness as this? An 
Italian woman, one of those divine creatures who, psycho- 
logically, are as far removed from the Parisian as if they lived 
at the Antipodes, a being who would be regarded as pro- 
foundly immoral on this side the Alps, an Italian (to resume) 
made the following comment on some French novels which 
she had been reading: “ I cannot see,” she remarked, “why 
these poor lovers take such a time over coming to an arrange- 


31 A 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


meat which ought to be the affair of a single morning.” 
Why should not the novelist take a hint from this worthy 
lady, and refrain from exhausting the theme and the reader ? 
Some few passages of coquetry it would certainly be pleasant 
to give in outline; the story of Mine, de Beauseant’s demurs 
and sweet delayings, that, like the vestal virgins of antiquity, 
she might fall gracefully, and by lingering over the innocent 
raptures of first love draw from it its utmost strength and 
sweetness. M. de Nueil was at an age when a man is the 
dupe of these caprices, of the fence which women delight to 
prolong; either to dictate their own terms, or to enjoy the 
sense of their power yet longer, knowing instinctively as they 
do that it must soon grow less. But, after all, these little 
boudoir protocols, less numerous than those of the Congress 
of London, are too small to be worth mentioning in the his- 
tory of this passion. 

For three years Mme. de Beauseant and M. de Nueil lived 
in the villa on the lake of Geneva. They lived quite alone, 
received no visitors, caused no talk, rose late, went out to- 
gether upon the lake, knew, in short, the happiness of which 
we all of us dream. It was a simple little house, with green 
shutters, and broad balconies shaded with awnings, a house 
contrived of set purpose for lovers, with its white couches, 
soundless carpets, and fresh hangings, everything within it 
reflecting their joy. Every window looked out on some new 
view of the lake ; in the far distance lay the mountains, fan- 
tastic visions of changing color and evanescent cloud ; above 
them spread the sunny sky, before them stretched the broad 
sheet of water, never the same in its fitful changes. All their 
surroundings seemed to dream for them, all things smiled 
upon them. 

Then weighty matters recalled M. de Nueil to France. 
His father and brother died, and he was obliged to leave 
Geneva. The lovers bought the house ; and, if they could 
have had their way, they would have removed the hills piece- 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


315 


meal, drawn off the lake with a siphon, and taken everything 
away with them. 

Mme. de Beauseant followed M. de Nueil. She realized 
her property, and bought a considerable estate near Maner- 
viHe, adjoining Gaston’s lands, and here they lived together • 
Gaston very graciously giving up Manerville to his mother 
for the present in consideration of the bachelor freedom in 
which she left him. 

Mme. de Beauseant’s estate was close to a little town in 
one of the most picturesque spots in the valley of the Auge. 
Heie the lovers raised barriers between themselves and social 
intercourse, baniers which no creature could overleap, and 
here the happy days of Switzerland were lived over again. 
For nine whole years they knew happiness which it serves no 
puipose to describe ; happiness which may be divined from 
the outcome of the story by those whose souls can compre- 
hend poetry and prayer in their infinite manifestations. 

All this time Mme. de Beauseant’s husband, the present 
Marquis (his father and elder brother having died), enjoyed 
the soundest health. There is no better aid to life than a 
certain knowledge that our demise would confer a benefit on 
some fellow-creature. M. de Beauseant was one of those 
ironical and wayward beings who, like holders of life-annui- 
ties, wake with an additional sense of relish every morning to 
a consciousness of good health. For the rest,* he was a man 
of the world, somewhat methodical and ceremonious, and a 
calculator of consequences, who could make a declaration 
of love as quietly as a lackey announces that “ Madame is 
served.” 

This brief biographical notice of his lordship the Marquis 
de Beauseant is given to explain the reasons why it was im- 
possible for the Marquise to marry M. de Nueil. 

So, after a nine years’ lease of happiness, the sweetest 
agreement to which a woman ever put her hand, M. de 
Nueil and Mme. de Beauseant were still in a position quite 

X 


316 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


as natural and quite as false as at the beginning of their ad* 
venture. And yet they had reached a fatal crisis, which may 
be stated as clearly as any problem in mathematics. 

Mme. le Comtesse de Nueil, Gaston’s mother, a straight- 
laced and virtuous person, who had made the late Baron happy 
in strictly legal fashion, would never consent to meet Mme. 
de Beauseant. Mme. de Beauseant quite understood that the 
worthy dowager must of necessity be her enemy, and that she 
would try to draw Gaston from his unhallowed and immoral 
way of life. The Marquise de Beauseant would willingly have 
sold her property and gone back to Geneva, but she could 
not bring herself to do it ; it would mean that she distrusted 
M. de Nueil. Moreover, he had taken a great fancy to this 
very Valleroy estate, where he was making plantations and 
improvements. She would not deprive him of a piece of 
pleasurable routine-work, such as women always wish for their 
husbands, and even for their lovers. 

A Mile, de Rodiere, twenty-two years of age, an heiress 
with a rent-roll of forty thousand livres, had come to live in 
the neighborhood. Gaston always met her at Manerville 
whenever he was obliged to go thither. These various per- 
sonages being to each other as the terms of a proportion 
sum, the following letter will throw light on the appalling 
problem which Mme. de Beauseant had been trying for the 
past month to-solve: 

“ My beloved angel, it seems like nonsense, does it not, to 
write to you when there is nothing to keep us apart, when a 
caress so often takes the place of words, and words too are 
caresses? Ah, well, my love. There are some things that a 
woman cannot say when she is face to face with the man she 
loves ; at the bare thought of them her voice fails her, and 
the blood goes back to her heart ; she has no strength, no 
intelligence left. It hurts me to feel like this when you are 
near me, and it happens often, I feel that my heart should 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


317 


be wholly sincere for you ; that I should disguise no thought, 
however transient, in my heart ; and I love the sweet careless- 
ness, which suits me so well, too much to endure this embar- 
rassment and constraint any longer. So I will tell you about 
my anguish — yes, it is anguish. Listen to me ! do not begin 
with the little ‘ Tut, tut, tut,’ that you use to silence me, an 
impertinence that I love, because anything from you pleases 
me. Dear soul from heaven, wedded to mine, let me first tell 
you that you have effaced all memory of the pain that once 
was crushing the life out of me. I did not know what love 
was before I knew you. Only the candor of your beautiful 
young life,, only the purity of that great soul of yours, could 
satisfy the requirements of an exacting woman’s heart. Dear 
love, how very often I have thrilled with joy to think that in 
these nine long, swift years, my jealousy has not been once 
awakened. All the flowers of your soul have been mine, all 
your thoughts. There has not been the faintest cloud in our 
heaven ; we have not known what sacrifice is; we have always 
acted on the impulses of our hearts. I have known happi- 
ness, infinite for a woman. Will the tears that drench this 
sheet tell you all my gratitude? I could wish that I had 
knelt to write the words ! Well, out of this felicity has arisen 
torture more terrible than the pain of desertion. Dear, there 
are very deep recesses in a woman s heart ; how deep in my 
own heart, I did not know myself until to-day, as I did not 
know the whole extent of love. The greatest misery which 
could overwhelm us is a light burden compared with the mere 
thought of harm for him whom we love. And how if we 

cause the harm, is it not enough to make one die? This 

is the thought that is weighing upon me. But it brings in 
its train another thought that is heavier far, a thought that 
tarnishes the glory of love, and slays it, and turns it into a 
humiliation which sullies life as long as it lasts. You are 
thirty years old ; I am forty. What dread this diffeience in 
age calls up in a woman who loves | It is possible that, first 


318 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


of all unconsciously, afterwards in earnest, you have felt the 
sacrifices that you have made by renouncing all in the world 
for me. Perhaps you have thought of your future from the 
social point of view, of the marriage which would, of course, 
increase your fortune, and give you avowed happiness and 
children who would inherit your wealth ; perhaps you have 
thought of reappearing in the world, and filling your place 
there honorably. And then, if so, you must have repressed 
those thoughts, and felt glad to sacrifice heiress and fortune 
and a fair future to me without my knowledge. In your young 
man’s generosity, you must have resolved to be faithful to the 
vows which bind 11s each to each in the sight of God. My 
past pain has risen up before your mind, and the misery from 
which you rescued me has been my protection. To owe 
your love to your pity ! The thought is even more painful to 
me than the fear of spoiling your life for you. The man who 
can bring himself to stab his mistress is very charitable if he 
gives her her death-blow while she is happy and ignorant of 

evil, while illusions are in full blossom Yes, death is 

preferable to the two thoughts which have secretly saddened 
the hours for several days. To-day, when you asked ‘ What 
ails you?’ so tenderly, the sound of your voice made me 
shiver. I thought that, after your wont, you were reading my 
very soul, and I waited for your confidence to come, thinking 
that my presentiments had come true, and that I had guessed 
at all that was going on in your mind. Then I began to think 
over certain little things that you always do for me, and I 
thought I could see in you the sort of affectation by which a 
man betrays a consciousness that his loyalty is becoming a 
burden. And in that moment I paid very dear for my happi- 
ness. I felt that nature always demands the price for the 
treasure called love. Briefly, has not fate separated us? Can 
you have said, * Sooner or later I must leave poor Claire ; 
why not separate in time ? ’ I read that thought in the 
depths of your eyes, and went away to cry by my self. 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


m 


Hiding my tears from you ! the first tears that I have shed 
for soi row for these ten years; I am too proud to let you see 
them, but I did not reproach you in the least. 

Yes, you are right. I ought not to be so selfish as to 
bind your long and brilliant career to my so-soon worn-out 
life. And yet— how if I have been mistaken ? How if I have 
taken your love melancholy for a deliberation ? Oh, my love, 
do not leave me in suspense ; punish this jealous wife of yours, 
but give her back the sense of her love and yours ; the whole 
woman lies in that that consciousness sanctifies everything. 

“ Since your mother came, since you paid a visit to Mile, 
de Rodiere, I have been gnawed by doubts dishonoring to us 
both. Make me suffer for this, but do not deceive me ; I 
want to know everything that your mother said and what you 
think ! If you have hesitated between some alternative and 
me, I give you back your liberty. I will not let you know 
what happens to me; I will not shed tears for you to see; 
only — I will not see you again. Ah ! I cannot go on, my 
heart is breaking 

“ I have been sitting benumbed and stupid for some mo- 
ments. Dear love, I do not find that any feeling of pride 
rises against you ; you are so kind-hearted, so open ; you 
would find it impossible to hurt me or to deceive me; and 
you will tell me the truth, however cruel it may be. Do you 
wish me to encourage your confession ? Well, then, heart of 
mine, I shall find comfort in a woman’s thought. Has not 
the youth of your being been mine, your sensitive, wholly gra- 
cious, beautiful, and delicate youth? No woman shall find 
henceforth the Gaston whom I have known, nor the deli- 
cious happiness that he has given me No ; you will never 

love again as you have loved, as you love me now ; no, I shall 
never have a rival, it is impossible. There will be no bitter- 
ness in my memories of our love, and I shall think of nothing 
else. It is out of your power to enchant any woman hence- 
forih by the childish provocations, the charming ways of a 


320 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


young heart, the soul’s winning charm, the body’s grace, the 
swift communion of rapture, the whole divine cortege of 
young love, in fine. 

“ Oh, you are a man now, you will obey your destiny, 
weighing and considering all things. You will have cares, 
and anxieties, and ambitions, and concerns that will rob her 
of the unchanging smile that made your lips fair for me. 
The tones that were always so sweet for me will be troubled 
at times; and your eyes that lighted up with radiance from 
heaven at the sight of me will often be lustreless for her. 
And besides, as it is impossible to love you as I love you, you 
will never care for that woman as you have cared for me. 
She will never keep a constant watch over herself as I have 
done; she will never study your happiness at every moment 
with an intuition which has never failed me. Ah, yes, the 
man, the heart and soul, which I shall have known will exist 
no longer. I shall bury him deep in my memory, that I may 
have the joy of him still ; I shall live happy in that fair past 
life of ours, a life hidden from all but our inmost selves. 

u Dear treasure of mine, if all the while no least thought 
of liberty has risen in your mind, if my love is no burden on 
you, if my fears are chimerical, if I am still your Eve — the 
one woman in the world for you — come to me as soon as you 
have read this letter ; come quickly ! Ah ! in one moment I 
will love you more than I have ever loved you, I think, in 
these nine years. After enduring the needless torture of these 
doubts of which I am accusing myself, every added day of 
love, yes, every single day, will be a whole lifetime of bliss. 
So speak, and speak openly ; do not deceive me, it would be 
a crime. Tell me, do you wish for your liberty? Have you 
thought of all that a man’s life means ? Is there any regret 
in your mind ? That / should cause you a regret ! I should 
die of it. I have said it : I love you enough to set your 
happiness above mine, your life before my own. Leave on 
one side, if you can, the wealth of memories of our nine 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


321 


years’ happiness, that they may not influence your decision, 
but speak ! I submit myself to you as to God, the one Con- 
soler who remains if you forsake me.” 

When Mme. de Beauseant knew that her letter was in M. 
de Nueil’s hands, she sank in such utter prostration, the over- 
pressure of many thoughts so numbed her faculties that she 
seemed almost drowsy. At any rate, she was suffering from 
a pain not always proportioned in its intensity to a woman’s 
strength ; pain which women alone know. And while the 
unhappy Marquise awaited her doom, M. de Nueil, reading 
her letter, felt that he was “in a very difficult position,” to 
use the expression that young men apply to a crisis of this 
kind. 

By this time he had all but yielded to his mother’s impor- 
tunities and to the attractions of Mile, de la Rodiere, a some- 
what insignificant, pink-and-white young person, as straight as 
a poplar. It is true that, in accordance with the rules laid 
down for marriageable young ladies, she scarcely opened her 
mouth, but her rent-roll of forty thousand livres spoke quite 
sufficiently for her. Mme. de Nueil, with a mother’s sincere 
affection, tried to entangle her son in virtuous courses. She 
called his attention to the fact that it was a flattering distinc- 
tion to be preferred by Mile, de la Rodiere, who had refused 
so many great matches; it was quite time, she urged, that he 
should think of his future, such a good opportunity might not 
repeat itself, some day he would have eighty thousand livres of 
income from land ; money made anything bearable ; if Mme. 
de Beauseant loved him for his own sake, she ought to be the 
first to urge him to marry. In short, the well-intentioned 
mother forgot no arguments which the feminine intellect can 
bring to bear upon the masculine mind, and by these means 
she had brought her son into a wavering condition. 

Mme. de Beaus6ant’s letter arrived just as Gaston’s love of 
her was holding out against the temptations of a settled life 
21 


322 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


conformable to received ideas. That letter decided the day. 
He made up his mind to break off with the Marquise and to 
marry. 

“One must live a man’s life,” said he to himself. 

Then followed some inkling of the pain that this decision 
would give to Mme. de Beauseant. The man’s vanity and the 
lover’s conscience further exaggerated this pain, and a sincere 
pity for her seized upon him. All at once the immensity of 
the misery became apparent to him, and he thought it neces- 
sary and charitable to deaden the deadly blow. He hoped to 
bring Mme. de Beauseant to a calm frame of mind by grad- 
ually reconciling her to the idea of separation ; while Mile, 
de la Rodiere, always like a shadowy third between them, 
should be sacrificed to her at first, only to be imposed upon 
her later. His marriage should take place later, in obedience 
to Mme. de Beauseant’s expressed wish. He went so far as 
to enlist the Marquise’s nobleness and pride and all the great 
qualities of her nature to help him to succeed in this com- 
passionate design. He would write a letter at once to allay 
her suspicions. A letter / For a woman with the most ex- 
quisite feminine perception, as well as the intuition of pas- 
sionate love, a letter in itself was a sentence of death. 

So when Jacques came and brought Mme. de Beauseant 
a sheet of paper folded in a triangle, she trembled, poor 
woman, like a snared swallow. A mysterious sensation of 
physical cold spread from head to foot, wrapping her about 
in an icy winding-sheet. If he did not rush to her feet, if 
he did not come to her in tears, and pale, and like a lover, 
she knew that all was lost. And yet, so many hopes are 
there in the heart of a woman who loves, that she is only 
slain by stab after stab, and loves on till the last drop of 
life-blood drains away. 

“ Does madame need anything? ” Jacques asked gently, as 
he went away. 

“ No,” she said. 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


323 


** Poor fellow!” she thought, brushing a tear from her 
eyes, “ he guesses my feelings, servant though he is ! ” 

She read: “My beloved, you are inventing idle terrors 

for yourself ” The Marquise gazed at the words, and a 

thick mist spread before her eyes. A voice in her heart 
cried, “He lies!” Then she glanced down the page with 
the clairvoyant eagerness of passion, and read these words at 

the foot, “ Nothing has been decided as yet ” Turning to 

the other side with convulsive quickness, she saw the mind of 
the writer distinctly through the intricacies of the wording ; 
this was no spontaneous outburst of love. She crushed it in 
her fingers, twisted it, tore it with her teeth, flung it in the 
fire, and cried aloud, “Ah ! base that he is ! I was his, and 
he has ceased to love me ! ” 

She sank half-dead upon the couch. 

M. de Nueil went out as soon as he had written his letter. 
When he came back, Jacques met him on the threshold with 
a note. “ Madame la Marquise has left the chateau,” said 
the man. 

M. de Nueil, in amazement, broke the seal and read : 

“ Madame : — If I could cease to love you, to take the 
chances of becoming an ordinary man which you hold out to 
me, you must admit that I should thoroughly deserve my fate. 
No, I shall not do as you bid me ; the oath of fidelity which 
I swear to you shall only be absolved by death. Ah ! take 
my life, unless indeed you do not fear to carry a remorse all 
through your own- ” 

It was his own letter, written to the Marquise as she set out 
for Geneva nine years before. At the foot of it Claire de 
Bourgogne had written, “ Monsieur, you are free.” 

M. de Nueil went to his mother at Manerville. In less 
than three weeks he married Mile. Stephanie de la Rodiere. 

If this commonplace story of real life ended here, it would 


324 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


be to some extent a sort of mystification. The first man you 
meet can tell you a better. But the widespread fame of the 
catastrophe (for, unhappily, this is a true tale), and all the 
memories which it may arouse in those who have known the 
divine delights of infinite passion, and lost them by their own 
deed, or through the cruelty of fate — these things may perhaps 
shelter the story from criticism. 

Mme. la Marquise de Beauseant never left Valleroy after 
her parting from M. de Nueil. After his marriage she still 
continued to live there, for some inscrutable woman’s reason ; 
any woman is at liberty to assign the one which most appeals 
to her. Claire de Bourgogne lived in such complete retire- 
ment that none of the servants, save Jacques and her own 
woman, ever saw their mistress. She required absolute silence 
all about her, and only left her room to go to the chapel on 
the Valleroy estate, whither a neighboring priest came to say 
mass every morning. 

The Comte de Nueil sank a few days after his marriage into 
something like conjugal apathy, which might be interpreted 
to mean either happiness or unhappiness. 

“ My son is perfectly happy,” his mother said everywhere. 

Mme. Gaston de Nueil, like a great many young women, 
was a rather colorless character, sweet and passive. A month 
after her marriage she had expectations of becoming a mother. 
All this was quite in accordance with ordinary views. M. de 
Nueil was very nice to her ; but two months after his separation 
from the Marquise, he grew notably thoughtful and abstracted. 
But then he always had been serious, his mother said. 

After seven months of this tepid happiness, a little thing 
occurred, one of those seemingly small matters which imply 
such great development of thought and such widespread 
trouble of soul, that only the bare fact can be recorded ; 
the interpretation of it must be left to the fancy of each 
individual mind. One day, when M. de Nueil had been 
shooting over the lands of Manerville and Valleroy, he crossed 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


325 


Mme. de Beaus£ant’s park on his way home, summoned 
Jacques, and when the man came, asked him, “Whether the 
Marquise was as fond of game as ever ? ” 

Jacques, answering in the affirmative, Gaston offered him a 
good round sum (accompanied by plenty of specious reason- 
ing) for a very little service. Would he set aside for the 
Marquise the game that the Count would bring? It seemed 
to Jacques to be a matter of no great importance whether the 
partridge on which his mistress dined had been shot by her 
keeper or by M. de Nueil, especially since the latter particu- 
larly wished that the Marquise should know nothing about it. 

“It was killed on her land,” said the Count, and for some 
days Jacques lent himself to the harmless deceit. Day after 
day M. de Nueil went shooting, and came back at dinner- 
time with an empty bag. A whole week went by in this way. 
Gaston grew bold enough to write a long letter to the Mar- 
quise, and had it conveyed to her. It was returned to him 
unopened. The Marquise’s servant brought it back about 
nightfall. The Count, sitting in the drawing-room listening, 
while his wife at the piano mangled a Caprice of Herold’s, 
suddenly sprang up and rushed to the Marquise, as if he were 
flying to an assignation. He dashed through a well-known 
gap into the park, and went slowly along the avenues, stop- 
ping now and again for a little to still the rapid beatings of his 
heart. Smothered sounds as he came nearer the chateau told 
him that the servants must be at supper, and he went straight 
to Mme. de Beauseant’s room. 

Mme. de Beauseant never left her bedroom. M. de Nueil 
could gain the doorway without making the slightest sound. 
There, by the light of two wax-candles, he saw the thin, 
white Marquise in a great armchair; her head was bowed, 
her hands hung listlessly, her eyes gazing fixedly at some 
object which she did not seem to see. Her whole attitude 
spoke of hopeless pain. There was a vague something like 
hope in her bearing, but it was impossible to say whither 


326 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


Claire de Bourgogne was looking — forwards to the tomb or 
backwards into the past. Perhaps M. de Nueil’s tears glit- 
tered in the deep shadows ; perhaps his breathing sounded 
faintly; perhaps unconsciously he trembled, or again it may 
have been impossible that he should stand there, his presence 
unfelt by that quick sense which grows to be an instinct, the 
glory, the delight, the proof of perfect love. However it 
was, Mme. de Beauseant slowly turned her face towards the 
doorway, and beheld her lover of bygone days. Then Gaston 
de Nueil came forward a few paces. 

“If you come any farther, sir,” exclaimed the Marquise, 
growing paler, “ I shall fling myself out of the window ! ’ ’ 

She sprang to the window, flung it open, and stood with 
one foot on the ledge, her hand upon the iron balustrade, her 
face turned towards Gaston. 

“Go out! go out!” she cried, “or I will throw myself 
over.” 

At that dreadful cry the servants began to stir, and M. de 
Nueil fled like a criminal. 

When he reached his home again he wrote a few lines and 
gave them to his own man, telling him to give the letter him- 
self into Mme. de Beauseant’s hands, and to say that it was a 
matter of life and death for his master. The messenger went. 
M. de Nueil went back to the drawing-room where his wife 
was still murdering the Caprice , and sat down to wait until 
the answer came. An hour later, when the Caprice had come 
to an end, and the husband and wife sat in silence on opposite 
sides of the hearth, the man came back from Valleroy and 
gave his master his own letter, unopened. 

M. de Nueil then arose, went into a small room beyond 
the drawing-room, where he had left his rifle, and shot 
himself. 

The swift and fatal ending of the drama, contrary as it 
is to all the habits of young France, is only what might have 
been expected. Those who have closely observed, or known 


a Forsaken woman. 


327 


for themselves by delicious experience, all that is meant by 
the perfect union of two beings, will understand Gaston de 
NueiPs suicide perfectly well. A woman does not bend and 
form herself in a day to the caprices of passion. The pleasure 
of loving, like some rare flower, needs the most careful inge- 
nuity of culture. Time alone, and two souls attuned each to 
each, can discover all its resources, and call into being all 
the tender and delicate delights for which we are steeped in a 
thousand superstitions, imagining them to be inherent in the 
heart that lavishes them upon us. It is this wonderful re- 
sponse of one nature to another, this religious belief, this 
certainty of finding peculiar or excessive happiness in the 
presence of one we love, that accounts in part for perdurable 
attachments and long-lived passion. If a woman possesses 
the genius of her sex, love never comes to be a matter of use 
and wont. She brings all her heart and brain to love, clothes 
her tenderness in forms so varied, there is such art in her 
most natural movements, or so much nature in her art, that in 
absence her memory is almost as potent as her presence. All 
other women a.*e as shadows compared with her. Not until 
we have lost 01 known the dread of losing a love so vast and 
glorious, do we prize it at its just worth. And if a man who 
has once possessed this love shuts himself out from it by his 
own act and deed, and sinks to some loveless marriage; if, 
by some incident, hidden in the obscurity of married life, the 
woman with whom he hoped to know the same felicity makes 
it clear that it will never be revived for him ; if, with the 
sweetness of divine love still on his lips, he has dealt a deadly 
wound to her , his wife in truth, whom he forsook for a social 
chimera — then he must either die or take refuge in a material- 
istic, selfish, and heartless philosophy, from which impassioned 
souls shrink in horror. 

As for Mme. de Beauseant, she doubtless did not imagine 
that her friend’s despair could drive him to suicide, when he 


328 


A FORSAKEN WOMAN. 


had drunk deep of love for nine years. Possibly she may 
have thought that she alone was to suffer. At any rate, she 
did quite rightly to refuse the most humiliating of all posi- 
tions ; a wife may stoop for weighty social reasons to a kind 
of compromise which a mistress is bound to hold in abhor- 
rence, for in the purity of her passion lies all its justification. 

Angouleme, September , 1832. 



i'ililiilliili' 



THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 

(La Fausse Maitresse . ) 

Dedicated to the Co?ntesse Clara Maffei. 

In the month of September, 1835, one of the richest 
heiresses of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, Mademoiselle du 
Rouvre, the only child of the Marquis du Rouvre, married 
Count Adam Mitgislas Laginski, a young Polish exile. 

I allow myself to spell the names as they are pronounced, 
to spare the reader the sight of the fortifications of conso- 
nants by which, in the Slav languages, the vowels are pro- 
tected, no doubt to secure them against loss, seeing how few 
they are. 

The Marquis du Rouvre had dissipated almost the whole 
of one of the finest fortunes of the nobility, to which he had 
formerly owed his alliance with a Mademoiselle de Ronque- 
rolles. Hence Clementine had for her uncle, on her mother’s 
side, the Marquis de Ronquerolles, and for her aunt Madame 
de Serizy. On her father’s side she possessed another uncle in 
the eccentric person of the Chevalier du Rouvre, the younger 
son of the house, an old bachelor who had grown rich by 
speculations in land and houses. 

The Marquis de Ronquerolles was so unhappy as to lose 
both his children during the visitation of cholera. Madame 
de Serizy’s only son, a young officer of the highest promise, 
was killed in Africa at the fight by the Macta. In these days 
rich families run the risk of ruining their children if they 
have too many, or of becoming extinct if they have but one 
or two, a singular result of the Civil Code not foreseen by 
Napoleon. Thus, by accident, and in spite of Monsieur du 

( 329 ) 


330 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


Rouvre’s reckless extravagances for Florine, one of the most 
charming of Paris actresses, Clementine had become an heir- 
ess. The Marquis de Ronquerolles, one of the most accom- 
plished diplomats of the new dynasty, his sister, Madame de 
Serizy, and the Chevalier du Rouvre agreed that, to rescue 
their fortunes from the Marquis’ clutches, they would leave 
them to their niece, to whom they each promised ten thousand 
francs a year on her marriage. 

It is quite unnecessary to say that the Pole, though a refu- 
gee, cost the French government absolutely nothing. Count 
Adam belonged to one of the oldest and most illustrious fami- 
lies of Poland, connected with most of the princely houses 
of Germany, with the Sapiehas, the Radziwills, the Mniszechs, 
the Rzewuskis, the Czartoryskis, the Leszinskis, the Lubomir- 
skis; in short, all the great Sarmatian skis. But a knowledge of 
heraldry is not a strong point in France under Louis Philippe, 
and such nobility could be no recommendation to the bour- 
geoisie then in power. Besides, when, in 1833, Adam made his 
appearance on the Boulevard des Italiens, at Frascati’s, at the 
Jockey Club, he led the life of a man who, having lost his 
political prospects, falls back on his vices and his love of 
pleasure. He was taken for a student. 

The Polish nationality, as the result of an odious govern- 
ment reaction, had fallen as low as the Republicans had tried 
to think it high. The strange struggle of 7 novenient against 
resistance — two words which thirty years hence will be inex- 
plicable — made a farce of what ought to have been so worthy : 
the name, that is, of a vanquished nation to which France 
gave hospitality, for which entertainments were devised, for 
which every one danced or sang by subscription ; a nation, in 
short, which at the time when, in 1796, Europe was fighting 
France, had offered her six thousand men, and such men ! 

Do not conclude from tl is that I mean to represent the 
Emperor Nicholas as being in the wrong as regards Poland, 
or Poland as regards the Emperor Nicholas. In the first place, 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


o31 


it would be a silly thing enough to slip a political discussion 
into a tale which ought to interest or to amuse. Besides, 
Russia and Poland were equally right : one for aiming at unity 
of empire, the other for desiring to be free again. It may 
be said, in passing, that Poland might have conquered Russia 
by the influence of manners instead of beating her with 
weapons; thus imitating the Chinese, who at last Chinesi- 
fied the Tartars, and who, it is to be hoped, will do the same 
by the English. Poland ought to have polished the Russians; 
Poniatowski had tried it in the least temperate district of the 
empire. But that gentleman was a misunderstood king — all 
the more so because he did not, perhaps, understand himself. 

How was it possible not to hate the poor people who were 
the cause of the horrible deceit committed on the occasion of 
the review when all Paris was eager to rescue Poland ? People 
affected to regard the Poles as allies of the Republican party, 
forgetting that Poland was an aristocratic republic. Thence- 
forth the party of wealth poured ignoble contempt on the 
Pole, who had been deified but a few days since. The wind 
of a riot has always blown the Parisians round from north to 
south under every form of government. This weathercock 
temper of Paris opinion must be remembered if we would 
understand how, in 1835, the name of Pole was a word of 
ridicule among the race who believe themselves to be the 
wittiest and politest in the world, and its central luminary, 
in a city which, at this day, wields the sceptre of art and 
literature. 

There are, alas ! two types of Polish refugees — the repub- 
lican Pole, the son of Lelewel, and the noble Pole of the 
party led by Prince Czartoryski. These two kinds of Pole 
are as fire and water, but why blame them ? Are not such 
divisions always to be observed among refugees whatever 
nation they belong to, and no matter what country they go 
to ? They carry their country and their hatreds with them. 
At Brussels two French emigrant priests expressed the greatest 


332 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


aversion for each other ; and when one of them was asked his 
reasons, he replied, pointing to his companion in misery, “ He 
is a jansenist ! ” Dante, in his exile, would gladly have 
stabbed any adversary of the “Bianchi.” In this lies the rea- 
son of the attacks made on the venerable Prince Adam Czar' 
toryski by the French radicals, and that of the disapproval 
shown to a section of the Polish emigrants by the Caesars of 
the counter and the Alexanders by letters patent. 

In 1834 Adam Mitgislas Laginski was the butt of Parisian 
witticisms. “He is a nice fellow though he is a Pole,” said 
Rastignac. “ All the Poles are great lords,” said Maxime de 
Trailles, “ but this one pays his gambling debts ; I begin to 
think that he must have had an estate.” 

And without offense to the exiles, it may be remarked that 
the levity, the recklessness, the fluidity of the Sarmatian char- 
acter justified the calumnies of the Parisians, who, indeed, 
in similar circumstances, would be exactly like the Poles. 
The French aristocracy, so admirably supported by the Polish 
aristocracy during the Revolution, certainly made no equiva- 
lent return to those who were forced to emigrate in 1832. 
We must have the melancholy courage to say that, in this, the 
Faubourg Saint-Germain remains Poland’s debtor. 

Was Count Adam rich, was he poor, was he an adventurer? 
The problem long remained unsolved. Diplomatic circles, 
faithful to their instructions, imitated the silence observed by 
the Emperor Nicholas, who at that time counted every Polish 
emigrant as dead. The Tuileries, and most of those who 
took their cue from thence, gave an odious proof of this char- 
acteristic policy dignified by the name of prudence. A 
Russian prince, with whom they had smoked many cigars at 
the time of the emigration, was ignored because, as it seemed, 
he had fallen into disgrace with the Emperor Nicholas. 

Thus placed between the prudence of the court and that of 
diplomatic circles, Poles of good family lived in the Biblical 
solitude of Super flumina Babylotiis , or frequented certain 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


333 


drawing-rooms which served as neutral territory for every 
variety of opinion. In a city of pleasure like Paris, where 
amusement is to be had in every rank, Polish recklessness 
found twice as many pretexts as it needed for leading a dis- 
sipated bachelor life. Besides, it must be said that Count 
Adam Laginski had against him at first both his appearance 
and his manners. 

There are two types of Pole, as there are two types of 
Englishwoman. When an Englishwoman is not a beauty, she 
is horribly ugly — and Count Adam belongs to the second cate- 
gory. His face is small, somewhat sour, and looks as if it had 
been squeezed in a vise. His short nose, fair hair, red mus- 
tache and beard give him the expression of a goat; all the 
more so because he is short and thin, and his eyes, tinged 
with dingy yellow, startle you by the oblique leer which Vir- 
gil’s line has made famous. How is it that, in spite of such 
unfavorable conditions, he has such exquisite manners and 
style? The solution of this mystery is given by his dress, 
that of a finished dandy, and by the education he owes to his 
mother, a Radziwill. If his courage carries him to the point 
of rashness, his mind is not above the current and trivial 
pleasantries of Paris conversation ; still, he does not often 
find a young fellow who is his superior among men of fashion. 
These young men nowadays talk far too much of horses, in- 
come, taxes, and deputies, for French conversation to be what 
it once was. Wit needs leisure, and certain inequalities of 
position. Conversation is better perhaps at St. Petersburg 
and Vienna than it is in Paris. Equals need no subtleties ; 
they tell each other everything straight out, just as it is. 
Hence the ironical laughters of Paris could scarcely discern a 
man of family in a light-hearted student, as he seemed, who 
in talking passed carelessly from one subject to another, who 
pursued amusement with all the more frenzy because he had 
just escaped from great perils, and who, having left the coun- 
try where his family was known, thought himself at liberty to 


334 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


lead an irresponsible life without risking a loss of considera- 
tion. 

One fine day in 1834, Adam bought a large house in the 
Rue de la Pepiniere. Six months later it was on as handsome 
a footing as the richest houses in Paris. Just at the time 
when Laginski was beginning to be taken seriously he saw 
Clementine at the Italian opera, and fell in love with her. A 
year later he married her. Madame d’Espard’s circle set the 
fashion of approval. Mothers of families then learned, too 
late, that ever since the year 900, the Laginskis had ranked 
with the most illustrious families of the north. By a stroke 
of prudence, most unlike a Pole, the young Count’s mother 
had, at the beginning of the rebellion, mortgaged her estates 
for an immense sum advanced by two Jewish houses, and in- 
vested in the French funds. Count Adam Laginski had an 
income of more than eighty thousand francs. This put an 
end to the astonishment expressed in some drawing-rooms at 
the rashness of Madame de Serizy, of old de Ronquerolles, 
and of the Chevalier du Rouvre in yielding to their niece’s 
mad passion. 

As usual, the world rushed from one extreme to the other. 
During the winter of 1836, Count Adam became the fashion, 
and Clementine Laginski one of the queens of Paris. Mad- 
ame de Laginski, at the present time, is one of the charming 
group of young married women among whom shine Mesdames 
de Lestorade, de Portendu£re, Marie de Vandenesse, du 
Guenic, and de Maufrigneuse, the very flower of Paris society, 
who live high above the parvenus, bourgeois, and wire-pullers 
of recent politics. 

This preamble was needful to define the sphere in which 
was carried through one of those sublime efforts, less rare 
than the detractors of the present time imagine — pearls hid- 
den in rough shells, and lost in the depths of that abyss, that 
ocean, that never- resting tide called the world — the age — 
Paris, London, or St. Petersburg — whichever you will. 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


335 


If ever the truth that architecture is the expression of the 
manners of a race was fully demonstrated, is it not since the 
revolution of 1830, under the reign of the House of Orleans? 
Great fortunes have shrunk in France, and majestic mansions 
of our fathers are constantly being demolished and replaced 
by a sort of tenement-houses, in which a peer of France of 
July dwells on the third floor, over some newly enriched 
empiric. Styles are mingled in confusion. As there is no 
longer any court, any nobility to set a ‘‘tone,” no harmony 
is to be seen in the productions of art. On the other hand, 
architecture has never found more economical tricks for imi- 
tating what is genuine and thorough, never displayed more 
ingenuity and resource in arrangement. Ask an artist to deal 
with a strip of the garden of an old “ hotel ” now destroyed, 
and he will build you a little Louvre crushed under its orna- 
mentation ; he will give you a courtyard, stables, and, if you 
insist, a garden ; inside he contrives such a number of little 
rooms and corridors, and cheats the eye so effectually, that 
you fancy yourself comfortable ; in fact, there are so many 
bedrooms that a ducal retinue can live and move in what 
was only the bake-house of a president of a law court. 

The Comtesse Laginski’s house is one of these modern 
structures, with a courtyard in front and a garden behind. 
To the right of the courtyard are the servants’ quarters, bal- 
anced on the left by the stables and coach-houses. The por- 
ter’s lodge stands between two handsome gates. The chief 
luxury of this house consists in a delightful conservatory at 
the end of a boudoir on the ground-floor, where all the 
beautiful reception-rooms are. It was a philanthropist driven 
out of England who built this architectural gem, constructed 
the conservatory, planned the garden, varnished the doors, 
paved the out-buildings with brick, filled the windows with 
green glass, and realized a vision like that — in due proportion 
— of George IV. at Brighton. The inventive, industrious, 
and ready Paris artisan had carved his doors and window- 


336 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


frames ; his ceilings were imitated from those of the middle 
ages or of Venetian palaces, and there was a lavish outlay of 
marble slabs in external paneling. Steinbock and Francois 
Souchet had carved the cornices of the doors and chimney- 
shelves ; Schinner had painted the ceilings with the brush of 
a master. The wonders of the stairs — marble as white as a 
woman’s arm — successfully defied those of the famous Hotel 
Rothschild. 

In consequence of the disturbances, the price of this folly 
was not more than eleven hundred thousand francs. For an 
Englishman this was giving it away. All this splendor, called 
princely by people who do not know what a real prince is, 
stood in the garden of a contractor — a Croesus of the Revolu- 
tion, who had died at Brussels a bankrupt after a sudden con- 
vulsion of the Bourse. The Englishman died at Paris — died 
of Paris — for to many people Paris is a disease ; sometimes it 
is several diseases. His widow, a Methodist, had a perfect 
horror of the nabob’s little house — this philanthropist had 
been a dealer in opium. The virtuous widow ordered that 
the scandalous property should be sold just at the time when 
the disturbances made peace doubtful on any terms. Count 
Adam took advantage of the opportunity ; and you shall be 
told how it happened, for nothing could be less consonant 
with his lordly habits. 

Behind this house, built of stone fretted like a melon, 
spreads the green velvet of an English lawn, shaded at the 
farther end by an elegant clump of exotic trees, among which 
rises a Chinese pavilion with its mute bells and pendent gilt 
eggs. The greenhouse and its fantastic decorations screen 
the outer wall on the south side. The other wall, opposite 
the greenhouse, is hung with creepers grown in arcades over 
poles and cross-beams painted green. This meadow, this 
realm of flowers, these graveled paths, this mimic forest, these 
aerial trellises cover an area of about twenty-five square 
perches, of which the present value would be four hundred 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


337 


thousand francs, as much as a real forest. -In the heart of 
this silence won from Paris birds sing ; there are blackbirds, 
nightingales, bullfinches, chaffinches, and numbers of spar- 
rows. The conservatory is a vast flower-bed, where the air 
is loaded with perfume, and where you may walk in winter as 
though summer was blazing with all its fires. The means by 
which an atmosphere is produced at will of the tropics, China 
or Italy, are ingeniously concealed from view. The pipes in 
which the boiling water circulates — the steam, hot air, what- 
not — are covered with soil, and look like garlands of growing 
flowers. 

The boudoir is spacious. On a small plot of ground the 
miracle wrought by the Paris fairy called Architecture is to 
produce everything on a large scale. The young Countess’ 
boudoir was the pride of the artist to whom Count Adam in- 
trusted the task of redecorating the house. To sin there 
would be impossible, there are too many pretty trifles. Love 
would not know where to alight amid work-tables of Chinese 
carving, where the eye can find thousands of droll little figures 
wrought in the ivory — the outcome of the toil of two families 
of Chinese artists; vases of burnt topaz mounted on filigree 
stands ; mosaics that invite to theft ; Dutch pictures, such as 
Schinner now paints again ; angels imagined as Steinbock 
conceives of them (but does not always work them out him- 
self) ; . statuettes executed by geniuses pursued by creditors 
(the true interpretation of the Arab myths) ; sublime first 
sketches by our greatest artists ; fronts of carved chests let 
into the wainscot, and alternating with the inventions of 
India embroidery; gold-colored curtains draped over the 
doors from an architrave of black oak wrought with the 
swarming figures of a hunting scene ; chairs and tables 
worthy of Madame de Pompadour ; a Persian carpet, and 
so forth. And finally, as a crowning touch, all this splendor, 
seen under a softened light filtering in through lace curtains, 
looks all the more beautiful. On a marble slab, among some 
22 


338 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


antiques, a lady’s whip, with a handle carved by Mademoiselle 
de Fauveau, shows that the Countess is fond of riding. 

Such is a boudoir in 1837, a display of property to divert 
the eye, as though ennui threatened to invade the most rest- 
less and unresting society in the world. Why is there nothing 
individual, intimate, nothing to invite reverie and repose? 
Why ? Because no one is sure of the morrow, and every one 
enjoys life as a prodigal spends a life-interest. 

One morning Clementine affected a meditative air, as she 
lounged on one of those deep siesta chairs from which we 
cannot bear to rise, so cleverly has the upholsterer who in- 
vented them contrived to fit them to the curves of laziness 
and the comfort of the Dolce far nie?ite. The doors to the 
conservatory were open, admitting the scent of vegetation 
and the perfumes of the tropics. The young wife watched 
Adam, who was smoking an elegant narghileh, the only form 
of pipe she allowed in this room. Over the other door, cur- 
tains, caught back by handsome ropes, showed two magnifi- 
cent rooms beyond : one in white and gold, resembling that 
of the Hotel Forbin-Janson, the other in the taste of the 
Renaissance. The dining-room, unrivaled in Paris by any 
but that of the Baron de Nucingen, is at the end of a corri- 
dor, with a ceiling and walls decorated in a mediaeval style. 
This corridor is reached, on the courtyard front, through a 
large anteroom, through whose glass door the splendor of 
the stairs is seen. 

The Count and Countess had just breakfasted ; the sky was 
a sheet of blue without a cloud ; the month of April was 
drawing to a close. The household had already known two 
years of happiness, and now, only two days since, Clementine 
had discovered in her home something resembling a secret, a 
mystery. A Pole, let it be repeated to his honor, is generally 
weak in the presence of a woman ; he is so full of tenderness 
that, in Poland, he becomes her inferior ; and though Polish 
women are admirable creatures, a Pole is even more quickly 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


839 


routed by a Parisienne. Hence, Count Adam, pressed hard 
with questions, had not enough artless cunning to sell his 
secret dear to his wife. With a woman there is always some- 
thing to be got for a secret ; and she likes you the better for 
it, as a rogue respects an honest man whom he has failed to 
take in. The Count, more ready with his sword than with 
his tongue, only stipulated that he should not be required to 
answer till he had finished his narghileh full of tombaki . 

“When we were traveling,” said she, “you replied to 
every difficulty by saying, ‘ Paz will see to that ! ’ You 
never wrote to anybody but Paz. On my return, every one 
refers me to the captain. I want to go out. The captain ! 
Is there a bill to be paid! The captain. If my horse’s 
pace is rough, they will speak to Captain Paz. In short, 
here I feel as if it were a game of dominoes ; everywhere 
Paz ! I hear no one talked of but Paz, but I can never see 
Paz. What is Paz? Let our Paz be brought to see me.” 

“Then is not everything as it ought to be?” said the 
Count, relinquishing the mouthpiece of his narghileh. 

“Everything is so quite what it ought to be, that if we 
had two hundred thousand francs a year, we should be ruined 
by living in the way we do with a hundred and ten thou- 
sand,” said she. She pulled the bell-handle embroidered in 
tent-stitch, a marvel of skill. A manservant dressed like a 
Minister at once appeared. 

“Tell Monsieur le Capitaine Paz that I wish to speak to 
him,” said she. 

“ If you fancy you will find anything out in that way ” 

said Count Adam with a smile. 

It may be useful to say that Adam and Clementine, married 
in December, 1835, a ^ ter spending the winter in Paris, had 
during 1836 traveled in Italy, Switzerland, and Germany. 
They returned home in November, and during the winter just 
past the Countess had for the first time received her friends, 
and then had discovered the existence — the almost speechless 



340 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


and unacknowledged, but most useful presence — of a factotum 
whose person seemed to be invisible — this Captain Paz or 
Pa$. 

‘ 4 Monsieur le Capitaine Paz begs Madame la Comtesse to 
excuse him ; he is round at the stables, and in a dress which 
does not allow of his coming at this minute. But as soon as 
he is dressed Count Paz will come,” said the manservant 
deferentially. 

“ Why, what was he doing?” 

“ He was showing Constantine how to groom the Countess’ 
horse; the man did not do it to his mind,” replied the 
servant. 

The Countess looked at the man ; he was quite serious, and 
took good care not to imply by a smile the comment which 
inferiors so often allow themselves on a superior who seems to 
have descended to their level. 

“ Ah, he was brushing down Cora? ” 

“ You are not riding out this morning, madame? ” said the 
servant; but he got no answer, and went. 

“ Is he a Pole?” asked Clementine of her husband, who 
bowed affirmatively. 

Clementine lay silent, examining Adam. Her feet, almost 
at full length on a cushion, her head in the attitude of a bird 
listening on the edge of its nest to the sounds of the grove, 
she would have seemed charming to the most blase of men. 
Fair and slight, her hair curled English fashion, she looked like 
one of the almost fabulous figures in “ Keepsakes,” especially 
as she was wrapped in a morning gown of Persian silk, of which 
the thick folds did not so effectually disguise the graces of 
her figure and the slenderness of her waist, as that they could 
not be admired through the thick covering of flowers and 
embroidery. As she crossed the brightly colored stuff over 
her chest, the hollow of her throat remained visible, the white 
skin contrasting in tone with the handsome lace trimming 
over the shoulders. Her eyes, fringed with black lashes, 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS . 


341 


emphasized the expression of curiosity that puckered a pretty 
mouth. On her well-formed brow were traced the character- 
istic curves of the Paris woman, willful, light-hearted, well- 
educated, but invulnerable to vulgar temptations. Her hands, 
almost transparent, hung from each arm of her deep chair ; 
the taper fingers, curved at the tips, showed nails like pink 
almonds that caught the light. 

Adam smiled at his wife’s impatience, gazing at her with a 
look which conjugal satiety had not yet made lukewarm. 
This slim little Countess had known how to be mistress in 
her own house, for she scarcely acknowledged Adam’s admi- 
ration. In the glances she stole at him there was perhaps a 
dawning consciousness of the superiority of a Parisienne to 
this spruce, lean, and red-haired Pole. 

“ Here comes Paz,” said the Count, hearing a step that 
rang in the corridor. 

The Countess saw a tall, handsome man come in, well-built, 
bearing in his features the marks of the grief which comes of 
strength and misfortune. Paz had dressed hastily in one of 
those tightly fitting coats, fastened by braid straps and oval 
buttons, which used to be called polonaises. Thick, black 
hair, but ill-kempt, covered his squarely-shaped head, and 
Clementine could see his broad forehead as shiny as a piece 
of marble, for he held his peaked cap in his hand. That 
hand was like the hand of the Hercules carrying the infant 
Mercury. Robust health bloomed in a face equally divided 
by a large Roman nose, which reminded Clementine of the 
handsome Trasteverini. A black silk stock put a finishing 
touch of martial appearance to this mystery of nearly six feet 
high, with jet-black eyes as lustrous as an Italian’s. The width 
of his full trousers, hiding all but the toes of his boots, 
showed that Paz still was faithful to the fashions of Poland. 
Certainly, to a romantic woman, there must have been some- 
thing burlesque in the violent contrast observable between 
the captain and the Count, between the little Pole with his 


342 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


narrow frame and this fine soldier, between the carpet-knight 
and the knight servitor. 

“ Good-morning, Adam,” he said to the Count with 
familiarity. 

Then he bowed gracefully, asking Clementine in what way 
he could serve her. 

“ Then you are Laginski’s friend ? ” asked the lady. 

“For life and death,” replied Paz, on whom the young 
Count shed his most affectionate smile, as he exhaled his last 
fragrant puff of smoke. 

“ Well, then, why do you not eat with us? Why did you 
not accompany us to Italy and to Switzerland ? Why do you 
hide yourself so as to avoid the thanks I owe you for the 
constant services you do us? ” said the young Countess, with 
a sort of irritation, but without the slightest feeling. 

In fact, she detected a kind of volunteer slavery on the part 
of Paz. At that time such an idea was inseparable from a 
certain disdain for a socially amphibious creature, a being at 
once secretary and bailiff, neither wholly bailiff nor wholly 
secretary, some poor relation — inconvenient as a friend. 

“The fact is, Countess,” he replied with some freedom, 
“ that no thanks are owing to me. I am Adam’s friend, and 
I find my pleasure in taking charge of his interests.” 

“ And is it for your pleasure too that you remain standing ? ” 
said Count Adam. 

Paz sat down in an armchair near the doorway. 

“ I remember having seen you on the occasion of our 
marriage, and sometimes in the courtyard,” said the lady; 
“ but why do you, a friend of Adam’s, place yourself in a 
position of inferiority?” 

“ The opinion of the Paris world is to me a matter of 
indifference,” said he. “ I live for myself, or, if you choose, 
for you two.” 

“But the opinion of the world as regards my husband’s 
friend cannot be a matter of indifference to me ” 



) 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


343 


“Oh, madame, the world is easily satisfied by one word: 
Eccentric — say that.” 

After a short pause he asked, “ Do you propose going 
out?” 

“ w iU you come to the Bois? ” said the Countess. 

With pleasure, and so saying Paz bowed and went out. 

“ Wha t a good soul ! He is as simple as a child,” said 
Adam. 

1 ell me now how you became friends,” said Clementine. 

Paz, my dearest, is of a family as old, as noble, and as 
illustrious as our own. At the time of the fall of the Pazzi 
a member of the family escaped from Florence into Poland, 
where he settled with some little fortune, and founded the 
family of the Paz, on which the title of Count was conferred. 

“ This family, having distinguished itself in the days of 
our royal republic, grew rich. The cutting from the tree 
felled in Italy grew with such vigor that there are several 
branches of the house of the Counts Paz. It will not, there- 
fore, surprise you to be told that there are rich and poor 
members of the family. Our Paz is the son of a poor branch. 
As an orphan, with no fortune but his sword, he served under 
the Grand Duke Constantine at the time of our Revolution. 
Carried away by the Polish party, he fought like a Pole, like 
a patriot, like a man who has nothing — three reasons for 
fighting well. In the last skirmish, believing his men were 
following him, he rushed on a Russian battery, and was taken 
prisoner. I was there. This feat of courage roused my 
blood. ‘ Let us go and fetch him ! ’ cried I to my horsemen. 
We charged the battery like freebooters, and I rescued Paz, I 
being the seventh. We were twenty when we set out, and 
eight when we came back, including Paz. 

“When Warsaw was betrayed we had to think of escaping 
from the Russians. By a singular chance Paz and I found our- 
selves together at the same hour and in the same place on the 
other side of the Vistula. I saw the poor captain arrested by 


344 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


some Prussians, who at that time had made themselves blood- 
hounds for the Russians. When one has fished a man out of 
the Styx, one gets attached to him. This new danger threat- 
ening Paz distressed me so much that I allowed myself to be 
taken with him, intending to be of service to him. Two men 
can sometimes escape when one alone is lost. Thanks to my 
name and some family connection with those on whom our 
fate depended — for we were then in the power of the Prus- 
sians — my flight was winked at. I got my dear captain 
through as a common soldier and a servant of my house, and 
we succeeded in reaching Dantzic. We stowed ourselves in a 
Dutch vessel sailing for England, where we landed two months 
later. 

“ My mother had fallen ill in England, and awaited me 
there ; Paz and I nursed her till her death, which was acceler- 
ated by the disasters to our cause. 

“We then left England, and I brought Paz to France; in 
such adversities two men become brothers. When I found 
myself in Paris with sixty-odd thousand francs a year, not to 
mention the remains of a sum derived from the sale of my 
mother’s diamonds and the family pictures, I wished to secure 
a living to Paz before giving myself up to the dissipations of 
Paris life. I had discerned some sadness in the captain’s eyes, 
sometimes even a suppressed tear floated there. I had had op- 
portunities of appreciating his soul, which is thoroughly noble, 
lofty, and generous. Perhaps it was painful to him to find 
himself bound by benefits to a man six years younger than 
himself without being able to repay him. I, careless and 
light-hearted as a boy, might ruin myself at play, or let my- 
self be ensnared by some woman ; Paz and I might some day 
be sundered. Though I promised myself that I would always 
provide for all his needs, I foresaw many chances of forget- 
ting, or being unable to pay Paz an allowance. In short, my 
angel, I wished to spare him the discomfort, the humilia- 
tion, the shame of having to ask me for money, or of seeking 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


345 


in vain for his comrade in some day of necessity. Lunque , 
one morning after breakfast, with our feet on the fire-dogs, 
each smoking his pipe, after many blushes, and with many 
precautions, till I saw he was looking at me quite anxiously, I 
held out to him a bond to bearer producing two thousand four 
hundred francs interest yearly ” 

Clementine quickly rose, seated herself on Adam’s knees, 
and putting her arm round his neck, kissed him on the brow, 
saying — 

“ Dear heart, how noble I think you ! And what did Paz 
say ? ’ ’ 

“Thaddeus? ” said the Count; “he turned pale and said 
nothing.” 

“ Thaddeus — is that his name? ” 

“Yes. Thaddeus folded up the paper and returned it to 
me, saying, ‘ I thought, Adam, that we were as one in life and 
death, and that we should never part ; do you wish to see no 
more of me.’ ‘Oh,’ said I, ‘is that the way you take it? 
Well, then, say no more about it. If I am ruined, you will 
be ruined.’ Said he, ‘You are not rich enough to live as a 
Laginski should ; and do you not need a friend to take care 
of your concerns, who will be father and brother to you, and 
a trusted confidant ? ’ My dear girl, Paz, as he uttered the 
words, spoke with a calmness of tone and look which covered a 
motherly feeling, but which betrayed the gratitude of an Arab, 
the devotion of a dog, and the friendship of a savage, always 
ready and always unassuming. On my honor ! I took him 
in our Polish fashion, laying my hand on his shoulder, and I 
kissed him on the lips. ‘For life and death then,’ said I. 

‘ All I have is yours, do just as you will.’ 

“ It was he who found me this house for almost nothing. 
He sold my shares when they were high, and bought when 
they were low, and we purchased this hovel out of the dif- 
ference. He is a connoisseur in horses, and deals in them so 
well that my stable has cost me very little, and yet I have the 


346 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


finest beasts and the prettiest turn-out in Paris. Our servants, 
old Polish soldiers whom he found, would pass through the 
fire for us. While I seem to be ruining myself, Paz keeps my 
house with such perfect order and economy that he has even 
made good some losses at play, the follies of a young man. 
My Thaddeus is as cunning as two Genoese, as keen for profit 
as a Polish Jew, as cautious as a good housekeeper. I have 
never been able to persuade him to live as I did when I was 
a bachelor. Sometimes it has needed the gentle violence of 
friendship to induce him to come to the play when I was going 
alone, or to one of the dinners I was giving at an eating-house 
to a party of congenial companions. He does not like the 
life of drawing-rooms.” 

“ Then what does he like? ” asked Clementine. 

“ He loves Poland, and weeps over her. His only ex- 
travagance has been money sent, more in my name than in his 
own, to some of our poor exiles.” 

“ Dear, how fond I shall be of that good fellow,” said the 
Countess. “ He seems to me as simple as everything that is 
truly great.” 

“All the pretty things you see here,” said Adam, praising 
his friend with the most generous security, “ have been found 
by Paz ; he has bought them at sales, or by some chance. 
Oh ! he is keener at a bargain than a trader. If you see him 
rubbing his hands in the courtyard, it is because he has ex- 
changed a good horse for a better. He lives in me ; his de- 
light is to see me well-dressed, in a dazzlingly smart carriage. 
He performs all the duties he imposes on himself without fuss 
or display. One night I had lost twenty thousand francs at 
whist. ‘ What will Paz say ? * thought I to myself as I reached 
home. Paz gave me the sum, not without a sigh ; but he did 
not blame me even by a look. This sigh checked me more 
than all the remonstrances of uncles, wives, or mothers in 
similar circumstances. ‘You regret the money?’ I asked 
him, ‘Oh, not for you, nor for myself j no, I was only think- 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 347 

ing that twenty poor relations of mine could have lived on it 
for a year.’ 

“ The family of Paz, you understand, is quite equal to that 
of Laginski, and I have never regarded my dear Paz as an in- 
ferior. I have tried to be as magnanimous in my degree as he 
in his. I never go out or come in without going to Paz, as if 
he were my father. My fortune is his. In short, Thaddeus 
knows that at this day I would rush into danger to rescue him, 
as I have done twice before.” 

“That is not a small thing to say, my dear,” remarked the 
Countess. “ Devotion is a lightning-flash. Men devote 
themselves in war, but they no longer devote themselves in 
Paris.” 

“ Well, then,” said Adam, “ for Paz I am always in war. 
Our two natures have preserved their asperities and their 
faults, but the mutual intimacy of our souls has tightened the 
bonds, already so close, of our friendship. A man may save 
his comrade’s life, and kill him afterwards if he finds him a 
bad companion ; but we have gone through what makes friend- 
ship indissoluble. There is between us that constant exchange 
of pleasing impressions on both sides which makes friendship, 
from that point of view, a richer joy, perhaps, than love.” 

A pretty little hand shut the Count’s mouth so suddenly 
that the movement was almost a blow. 

“Yes, indeed, my darling,” said he. “ Friendship knows 
nothing of the bankruptcy of sentiment, the insolvency of 
pleasures. Love, after giving more than it has, ends by 
giving less than it receives? ” 

“On both sides alike then,” said Clementine, smiling. 

“Yes,” said Adam. “While friendship can but increase. 
You need not pout. We, my angel, are as much friends as 
lovers; we, at least, I hope, have combined the two feelings 
in our happy marriage.” 

“I will explain to you what has made you twcfSuch good 
friends,” said Clementine. “The difference in your lives 

Y 


348 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


arises from a difference in your tastes, and not from com- 
pulsory choice ; from preference, and not from the necessity 
of position. So far as a man can be judged from a glimpse, 
and from what you tell me, in this instance the subaltern may 
at times be the superior.” 

“Oh! Paz is really my superior,” replied Adam simply. 
“ I have no advantage over him but that of luck.” 

His wife kissed him for this generous avowal. 

“ The perfect skill with which he conceals the loftiness of 
his soul is an immense superiority,” the Count went on. “I 
say to him, ‘ You are a sly fellow ; you have vast domains in 
your mind to which you retire.’ He has a right to the title 
of Count Paz; in Paris he will only be called captain.” 

“In short, a Florentine of the middle ages has resuscitated 
after three centuries,” said the Countess. “ There is some- 
thing of Dante in him, and something of Michael Angelo.” 

“Indeed, you are right; he is at heart a poet,” replied 
Adam. 

“And so I am married to two Poles,” said the young 
Countess, with a gesture resembling that of a genius on the 
stage. 

“Darling child!” said Adam, clasping Clementine to 
him, “ you would have distressed me very much if you had 
not liked my friend. We were both afraid of that, though 
he was delighted at my marrying. You will make him very 
happy by telling him that you love him — oh ! as an old 
friend.” 

“ Then I will go to dress ; it is fine, we will all three go 
out,” said Clementine, ringing for her maid. 

Paz led such an underground life that all the fashion of 
Paris wondered who it was that .accompanied Clementine 
Laginski when they saw her driving to the Bois and back 
between him and her husband. During the drive Clementine 
had insisted that Thaddeus was to dine with her. This whim 
of a despotic sovereign compelled the captain to make an 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


349 


unwonted toilet. On returning from her drive Clementine 
dressed with some coquettish care, in such a way as to pro- 
duce an effect even on Adam as she entered the room where 
the two friends were awaiting her. 

“Count Paz,” said she, “we will go to the opera to- 
gether.” 

It was said in the tone which from a woman conveys, “If 
you refuse, we shall quarrel.” 

“With pleasure, madame,” replied the captain. “ But as 
I have not a count’s fortune, call me captain.” 

“ Well, then, captain, give me your arm,” said she, taking 
it and leading him into the dining-room with a suggestion of 
the caressing familiarity which usually so greatly enraptures 
a lover. 

The Countess placed the captain next her, and he sat like 
a poor sub- lieutenant dining with a wealthy general. Paz 
left it to Clementine to talk, listening to her with all the air 
of deference to a superior, contradicting her in nothing, and 
waiting for a positive question before making any reply. In 
short, to the Countess he seemed almost stupid, and her 
graces all fell flat before this icy gravity and diplomatic dig- 
nity. In vain did Adam try to rouse him by saying, “ Come, 
cheer up, captain. It might be supposed that you were not 
at home. You must have laid a bet that you would discon- 
cert Clementine?” Thaddeus remained heavy and half- 
asleep. 

When the three were alone at dessert the captain explained 
that his life was planned diametrically unlike that of other 
people; he went to bed at eight o’clock, and rose at day- 
break ; and he thus excused himself, saying he was very 
sleepy. 

“ My intention in taking you to the opera was only to 
amuse you, Captain Paz; but do just as you please,” said 
Clementine, a little nettled. 

“ I will go,” said Paz. 


350 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


“ Duprez is singing in William Tell," said Adam. “ Would 
you prefer the Varietcs ? ’ ’ 

The captain smiled and rang the bell ; the manservant 
appeared. “Tell Constantine,” said Paz, “to take out the 
large carriage instead of the coup6. We cannot sit comfort- 
ably in it,” he added, turning to the Count. 

“A Frenchman would not have thought of that,” said 
Clementine, smiling. 

“Ah, but we are Florentines transplanted to the north,” 
replied Thaddeus, with a meaning and an expression which 
showed that his dullness at dinner had been assumed. 

But by a very conceivable want of judgment, there was too 
great a contrast between the involuntary self-betrayal of this 
speech and the captain’s attitude during dinner. Clementine 
examined him with one of those keen flashes by which a 
woman reveals at once her surprise and her observancy. 
Thus, during the few minutes while they were taking their 
coffee in the drawing-room, silence reigned — an uncomfort- 
able silence for Adam, who could not divine its cause. 
Clementine no longer disturbed Thaddeus. The captain, 
for his part, retired again into military rigidity, and came 
out of it no more, either on the way, or in the box, where 
he affected to be asleep. 

“You see, madame, that I am very dull company,” said 
he, during the ballet in the last act of William Tell. “Was 
I not right to ‘ stick to my last,’ as the proverb says? ” 

“ On my word, my dear captain, you are neither a cox- 
comb nor a chatterbox ; you are perhaps a Pole.” 

“Leave me then to watch over your pleasures,” he replied, 
“to take care of your fortune and your house; that is all 
I am good for.” 

“Tartufc! begone!” cried Adam, smiling. “ My dear, 
he is full of heart, well informed — he could, if he chose, 
hold his own in any drawing-room. Clementine, do not 
believe what his modesty tells you.” 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


351 


“ Good-night, Countess. I have proved my willingness, 
and now will avail myself of your carriage to go to bed at 
once. I will send it back for you.” 

Clementine bowed slightly, and let him go without re- 
plying. 

“ What a bear ! ” said she to the Count. “ You are much, 
much nicer.” 

Adam pressed his wife’s hand unseen. 

“ Poor, dear Thaddeus, he has endeavored to be a foil 
when many men would have tried to seem more attractive 
than I.” 

“ Oh ! ” said she, “ I am not sure that was not intentional; 
his behavior would have mystified an ordinary woman.” 

Half an hour later, while Boleslas the groom was calling 
“ Gate,” and the coachman, having turned the carriage to 
drive in, was waiting for the gates to be opened, Clementine 
said to the Count — 

“ Where does the captain roost? ” 

“ Up there,” said Adam, pointing to an elegantly con- 
structed attic extending on both sides of the gateway with a 
window looking on to the street. “ His rooms are over the 
coach-houses.” 

“ And who lives in the other half? ” 

“No one as yet,” replied Adam. “ The other little 
suite, over the stables, will do for our children and their 
tutor.” 

“ He is not in bed,” said the Countess, seeing a light in 
the captain’s room when the carriage was under the pillared 
portico — copied from that at the Tuileries, and taking the 
place of the ordinary zinc awning painted to imitate striped 
ticking. 

Paz, in his dressing-gown, and pipe in hand, was watching 
Clementine as she disappeared into the hall. The day had 
been a cruel one to him. And this is the reason : Thaddeus 
had felt a fearful shock to his heart on the day when, Adam 


352 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


having taken him to the opera to pronounce his opinion, he 
first saw Mademoiselle du Rouvre ; and again, when he saw 
her in the mayor’s office and at Saint-Thomas d’Aquin, and 
recognized in her the woman whom a man must love to the 
exclusion of all others — for Don Juan himself preferred one 
among the mille e tre! 

Hence Paz had strongly advocated the classical bridal tour 
after the wedding. Fairly easy all the time while Clementine 
was absent, his tortures began again on the return of the 
happy couple. And this was what he was thinking as he in- 
haled his latakia from a cherry-stem pipe, six feet long, a gift 
from Adam: “Only I and God, who will reward me for 
suffering in silence, may ever know how I love her ! But how 
can I manage to avoid alike her love or her hatred ? ” 

And he sat thinking, thinking, over this problem of the 
strategy of love. 

It must not be supposed that Thaddeus lived bereft of all 
joy in the midst of his pain. The triumphant cunning of 
this day was a source of secret satisfaction. Since the Count’s 
return with his wife, day by day he felt ineffable happiness in 
seeing that he was necessary to the couple, who, but for him, 
would have rushed inevitably into ruin. What fortune can 
hold out against the extravagance of Paris life ? Clementine, 
brought up by a reckless father, knew nothing of household 
management, which nowadays the richest women and the 
highest in rank are obliged to undertake themselves. Who in 
these days can afford to keep a steward? Adam, on his part, 
as the son of one of the great Polish nobles who allowed 
themselves to be devoured by the Jews, and who was incapable 
of husbanding the remains of one of the most enormous for- 
tunes in Poland — where fortunes were enormous — was not of 
a temper to restrict either his own fancies or his wife’s. If 
he had been alone, he would probably have ruined himself 
before his marriage. Paz had kept him from gambling on 
the Bourse, and does not that say all ? 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


353 


Consequently, when he found that, in spite of himself, he 
was in love with Clementine, Paz had not the choice of leav- 
ing the house and traveling to forget his passion. Gratitude, 
the clue to the mystery of his life, held him to the house 
where he alone could act as man of business to this heedless 
couple. Their long absence made him hope for a calmer 
spirit : but the Countess came back more than ever lovely, 
having acquired that freedom of thought which marriage con- 
fers on the Paris woman, and displaying all the charms of a 
young wife, with the indefinable something which comes of 
happiness, or of the independence allowed her by a man as 
trusting, as chivalrous, and as much in love as Adam was. 

The consciousness of being the working hub of this mag- 
nificent house, the sight of Clementine stepping out of her 
carriage on her return from a party, or setting out in the 
morning for the Bois de Boulogne, a glimpse of her on the 
Boulevards in her pretty carriage, like a flower in its nest of 
leaves, filled poor Thaddeus with deep, mysterious ecstasies 
which blossomed at the bottom of his heart without the slight- 
est trace appearing in his features. How, during these five 
months, should the Countess ever have seen the captain? 
He hid from her, concealing the care he took to keep out of 
her way. 

Nothing is so near divine love as a hopeless love. Must 
not a man have some depth of soul thus to devote himself in 
silence and obscurity? This depth, where lurks the pride of 
a father — or of God — enshrines the worship of love for love’s 
sake, as power for power’s sake was the watchword of the 
Jesuits ; a sublime kind of avarice, since it is perennially gen- 
erous, and modeled indeed on the mysterious Being of the 
first principles of the world. Is not their result nature ? And 
nature is an enchantress ; she belongs to man, to the poet, the 
painter, the lover ; but is not the cause superior to nature in 
the sight of certain privileged souls, and some stupendous 
thinkers? The cause is God. In that sphere of causes dwelt 
23 


354 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


the spirits of Newton, of Laplace, of Kepler, of Descartes, 
Malebranche, Spinoza, Buffon, of the true poets and saints of 
the second century of our era, of Saint Theresa of Spain and 
the sublime mystics. Every human emotion contains some 
analogy with the frame of mind in which the effect is neg- 
lected in favor of the cause, and Thaddeus has risen to the 
height whence all things look different. Abandoned to the 
unspeakable joys of creative energy, Thaddeus was, in love, 
what we recognize as greatest in the records of genius. 

“ No, she is not altogether deceived,” thought he, as he 
watched the smoke curl from his pipe. “She might involve 
me in an irremediable quarrel with Adam if she spited me ; 
and if she should flirt to torment me, what would become of 
me ? ” 

The fatuity of this hypothesis was so unlike the captain’s 
modest nature, and his somewhat German shyness, that he was 
vexed with himself for its having occurred to him, and went 
to bed determined to await events before taking any decisive 
steps. 

Next morning Clementine breakfasted very well without 
Thaddeus, and made no remark on his disobedience. That 
day, as it happened, was her day for being “at home,” and 
this, with her, demanded a royal display. She did not ob- 
serve the absence of Captain Paz, on whom devolved all the 
arrangements for these great occasions. 

“Well and good!” said Paz to himself, as he heard the 
carriages rumble out at two in the morning; “the Countess 
was only prompted by a Parisian’s whim or curiosity.” 

So the captain fell back into his regular routine, disturbed 
for a day by this incident. Clementine, diverted by the de- 
tails of life in Paris, seemed to have forgotten Paz. For do 
you suppose that it is a mere trifle to reign over this incon- 
stant city ? Do you imagine, by any means, that a woman 
risks nothing but her fortune playing at that absorbing 
game ? 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS . 


355 


The winter is to a woman of fashion what, of yore, a cam- 
paign was to the soldiers of the empire. What a work of art 
— of genius — is a costume or a head-dress created to make a 
sensation ! A fragile, delicate woman wears her hard and 
dazzling armor of flowers and diamonds, silk and steel, from 
nine in the evening till two or often three in the morning. 
She eats little, to attract the eye by her slender shape ; she 
cheats the hunger that attacks her during the evening with de- 
bilitating cups of tea, sweet cakes, heating ices, or heavy slices 
of pastry. The stomach must submit to the commands of 
vanity. She awakes late, and thus everything is in contradic- 
tion to the laws of nature, and nature is ruthless. 

No sooner is she up than the woman of fashion begins to 
dress for the morning, planning her dress for the afternoon. 
Must she not receive and pay visits, and go to the Bois on 
horseback or in her carriage ? Must she not always be prac- 
ticing the drill of smiles, and fatigue her brain in inventing 
compliments which shall seem neither stale nor studied? And 
it is not every woman who succeeds. And then you are sur- 
prised, when you see a young woman, whom the world has 
welcomed in her freshness, faded and blighted at the end of 
three years. Six months spent in the country are barely 
enough to heal the wounds inflicted by the winter. We hear 
nothing talked of but dyspepsia and strange maladies, un- 
known to women who devote themselves to their household. 
Formerly a woman was sometimes seen ; now she is perpe- 
tually on the stage. 

Clementine had to fight her way ; she was beginning to be 
quoted, and amid the cares of this struggle between her and 
her rivals there was hardly a place for love of her husband ! 
Thaddeus might well be forgotten. However, a month later, 
in May, a few days before her departure to stay at Ronque- 
rolles in Burgundy, as she was returning from her drive she 
saw Thaddeus in a side alley of the Champs-Elysees — Thad- 
deus, carefully dressed, and in raptures at seeing his Countess 


356 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


so beautiful in her phaeton, with champing horses, splendid 
liveries ; in short, the dear people he admired so much. 

“ There is the captain,” said she to Adam. 

“ Happy fellow ! ” said the Count. “ These are his great 
treats ! There is not a smarter turn-out than ours, and he 
delights in seeing everybody envying us our happiness. You 
have never noticed him before, but he is there almost every 
day.” 

“ What can he be thinking of? ” said Clementine. 

“ He is thinking at this moment that the winter has cost a 
great deal, and that we shall save a little by staying with your 
old uncle Ronquerolles,” said Adam. 

The Countess had the carriage stopped in front of Paz, and 
desired him to take the seat by her side in the carriage. 
Thaddeus turned as red as a cherry. 

“ I shall poison you,” he said ; “ I have just been smoking 
cigars.” 

“ And does not Adam poison me? ” she replied quickly. 

“ Yes, but he is Adam,” replied the captain. 

“ And why should not Thaddeus enjoy the same privilege ? ” 
said the Countess with a smile. 

This heavenly smile had a power which was too much for 
his heroic resolutions; he gazed at Clementine with all the 
fire of his soul in his eyes, but tempered by the angelic 
expression of his gratitude — that of a man who lived solely by 
gratitude. The Countess folded her arms in her shawl, leaned 
back pensively against the cushions, crumpling the feathers 
of her handsome bonnet, and gazed out at the passers-by. 
This flash from a soul so noble, and hitherto so resigned, 
appealed to her feelings. What, after all, was Adam’s great 
merit ? Was it not natural that he should be brave and gen- 
erous ? But the captain I Thaddeus possessed, or seemed to 
possess, an immense superiority over Adam. What sinister 
thoughts distressed the Countess when she once more observed 
the contrast between the fine, complete physical nature which 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


357 


distinguished Thaddeus and the frail constitution which, in 
her husband, betrayed the inevitable degeneration of aristo- 
cratic families which are so mad as to persist in intermarrying ! 
But the devil alone knew these thoughts, for the young wife 
sat with vague meditation in her eyes, saying nothing till they 
reached home. 

“ You must dine with us, or I shall be angry with you for 
having disobeyed me,” said she as she went in. “ You are 
Thaddeus to me, as you are to Adam. I know the obliga- 
tions you feel to him, but I also know all we owe to you. In 
return for two impulses of generosity which are so natural, 
you are generous at all hours and day after day. My father 
is coming to dine with us, as well as my uncle Ronquerolles 
and my aunt de Serizy ; dress at once,” she said, pressing the 
hand he offered to help her out of the carriage. 

Thaddeus went to his room to dress, his heart at once re- 
joicing and oppressed by an agonizing flutter. He came 
down at the last moment, and all through dinner played his 
part of a soldier fit for nothing but to fulfill the duties of a 
steward. But this time Clementine was not his dupe. His 
look had enlightened her. Ronquerolles, the cleverest of 
ambassadors next to Talleyrand, and who served de Marsay 
so well during his short ministry, was informed by his niece 
of the high merits of Count Paz, who had so modestly made 
himself his friend's steward. 

“And how is it that this is the first time I have ever seen 
Count Paz?” asked the Marquis de Ronquerolles. 

“Eh ! he is very sly and underhand,” replied Clementine, 
with a look at Paz to desire him to change his demeanor. 

Alas ! it must be owned, at the risk of making the captain 
less interesting to the reader, Paz, though superior to his friend 
Adam, was not a man of strong temper. He owed his appar- 
ent superiority to his misfortunes. In his days of poverty and 
isolation at Warsaw he had read and educated himself, had 
compared and thought much ; but the creative power which 


B58 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


makes a great man he did not possess — can it ever be ac- 
quired ? Paz was great only through his feelings, and there 
could rise to the sublime ; but in the sphere of sentiment, be- 
ing a man of action rather than of ideas, he kept his thoughts 
to himself. His thoughts, then, did nothing but eat his heart 
out. 

And what, after all, is an unuttered thought ? 

At Clementine’s speech the Marquis de Ronquerolles and 
his sister exchanged glances, with a side-look at their niece, 
Count Adam, and Paz. It was one of those swift dramas 
which are played only in Italy or in Paris. Only in these two 
parts of the world — excepting at all courts — can the eyes say 
as much. To infuse into the eye all the power of the soul, 
to give it the full value of speech and throw a poem or a drama 
into a single flash, excessive servitude or excessive liberty is 
needed. 

Adam, the Marquis du Rouvre, and the Countess did not 
perceive this flash of observation between a past coquette and 
an old diplomat ; but Paz, like a faithful dog, understood 
its forecast. It was, you must remember, an affair of two 
seconds. To describe the hurricane that ravaged the captain’s 
heart would be too elaborate for these days. 

“ What ! the uncle and aunt already fancy that she perhaps 
loves me? ” said he to himself. “ My happiness then depends 
only on my own audacity. And Adam ! ” 

Ideal love and mere desire, both quite as potent as friend- 
ship and gratitude, rent his soul, and for a moment love had 
the upper hand. This poor heroic lover longed to have his 
day ! Paz became witty ; he intended to please, and in an- 
swer to some question from Monsieur de Ronquerolles he 
sketched in grand outlines the Polish rebellion. Thus, at 
dessert, Paz saw Clementine drinking in every word, regarding 
him as a hero, and forgetting that Adam, after sacrificing a 
third of his immense fortune, had taken the risks of exile. 
At nine o’clock, having taken coffee, Madame de S6rizy kissed 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


309 


her niece on the forehead and took leave, carrying off Count 
Adam with an assertion of authority, and leaving the Marquis 
du Rouvre and M. de Ronquerolles, who withdrew ten min- 
utes later. Paz and Clementine were left together. 

“I w iU bid you good-night, madame,” said Thaddeus; 
“you will join them at the opera.’ ’ 

“ No,” replied she. “ I do not care for dancing, and they 
are giving an odious ballet this evening, ‘ The Revolt of the 
Seraglio.’ ” 

There was a moment’s silence. 

“ Two years ago Adam would not have gone without me,” 
she went on, without looking at Paz. 

“ He loves you to distraction ” Thaddeus began. 

“ Oh ! it is because he loves me to distraction that by 
to-morrow he will perhaps have ceased to love me ! ” ex- 
claimed the Countess. 

“ The women of Paris are inexplicable,” said Thaddeus. 
“When they are loved to distraction, they want to be loved 
rationally ; when they are loved rationally, they accuse a man 
of not knowing how to love.” 

“And they are always right, Thaddeus,” she replied with 
a smile. “ I know Adam well ; I owe him no grudge for it ; 
he is fickle, and, above all, a great gentleman ; he will always 
be pleased to have me for his wife, and will never thwart me 
in any of my tastes; but ” 

“What marriage was ever without a but?” said Thad- 
deus gently, trying to give the Countess’ thoughts another 
direction. 

The least conceited man would perhaps have had the 
thought which nearly drove this lover mad: “If I do 
not tell her that I love her,” said he to himself, “ I am 
an idiot ! ” 

There was silence between these two, one of those terrible 
pauses which seem bursting with thoughts. The Countess 
fixed a covert gaze on Paz, and Paz watched her in a mirror. 


360 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


Sitting back in his armchair, like a man given up to digestion, 
in the attitude of an old man or an indifferent husband, the 
captain clasped his hands over his stomach, and mechanically 
twirled his thumbs, looking stupidly at their rapid movement. 

“ But say something good about Adam ! ’ ’ exclaimed Clem- 
entine. “ Tell me that he is not fickle, you who know him 
so well.” 

The appeal was sublime. 

“This is the opportunity for raising an insurmountable bar- 
rier between us,” thought the unhappy Paz, devising a heroic 
lie. “Something good,” he said aloud. “I love him too 
well, you would not believe me. I am incapable of telling 
you any evil of him. And so, madame, I have a hard part 
to play between you two.” 

Clementine looked down, fixing her eyes on his patent- 
leather shoes. 

“ You northerners have mere physical courage, you have 
no constancy in your decisions,” said she in a low tone. 

“What are you going to do alone, madame? ” replied Paz, 
with a perfectly ingenuous expression. 

“You are not going to keep me company? ” 

“Forgive me for leaving you.” 

“ Why ! where are you going ? ” 

“I am going to the circus; it is the first night, in the 
* 

Champs-Elys£es, and I must not fail to be there ” 

“Why not?” asked Clementine, with a half-angry flash. 

“Must I lay bare my heart?” he replied coloring, “and 
confide to you what I conceal from my dear Adam, who be- 
lieves that I love Poland alone ? ” 

“ What ! our dear noble captain has a secret ? ” 

“A disgrace which you will understand, and for which you 
can comfort me.” 

“ A disgrace ! You? ” 

“Yes, I — Count Paz — am madly in love with a girl who 
was touring round France with the Bouthor family, people 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


361 


who have a circus after the pattern of Franconi’s, but who 
only perform at fairs ! I got her an engagement from the 
manager of the Cirque-Olympique.” 

“ Is she handsome ? ” asked the Countess. 

“ In my eyes,” he replied sadly. “Malaga, that is her 
name to the public, is strong, nimble, and supple. Why do 
I prefer her to every other woman in the world ? Indeed, I 
cannot tell you. When I see her with her black hair tied 
back with blue ribbons that float over her bare, olive-tinted 
shoulders, dressed in a white tunic with a gilt border, and silk 
tights which make her appear a living Greek statue, her feet 
in frayed satin slippers, flourishing flags in her hand to the 
sound of a military band, and flying through an enormous 
hoop covered with paper which crashes in the air — when her 
horse rushes round at a gallop, and she gracefully drops on to 
him again, applauded, honestly applauded, by a whole people 
— well, it excites me." 

“ More than a woman at a ball?" said Clementine, with 
insinuating surprise. 

“Yes,” said Paz in a choked voice. “This splendid 
agility, this unfailing grace in constant peril, seem to me the 
greatest triumph of woman. Yes, madame, Cinti and Mali- 
bran, Grisi and Taglioni, Pasta and Elsler, all who reign or 
ever reigned on the boards, seem to me unworthy to untie 
Malaga’s shoe-strings — Malaga, who can mount or dismount 
a horse at a mad gallop, who slips under him from the left to 
reappear on the right, who flutters about the most fiery steed 
like a white will-o’-the-wisp, who can stand on the tip of one 
toe and then drop, sitting with her feet hanging, on a horse 
still galloping round, and who finally stands on his back with- 
out any reins, knitting a stocking, beating eggs, or stirring an 
omelette, to the intense admiration of the people, the true 
people, the peasantry and soldiers. During the walk round, 
madame, that enchanting Columbine used to carry chairs 
balanced on the tip of her nose, the prettiest Greek nose I 


362 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


ever saw. Malaga is dexterity personified. Her strength is 
Herculean ; with her tiny fist or her little foot she can shake 
off three or four men. She is the goddess of the athletes.” 

“ She must be stupid.” 

“Oh! ” cried Paz, “she is as amusing as the heroine of 
1 Peveril of the Peak. ’ As heedless as a gypsy, she says 
everything that comes into her head ; she cares no more for 
the future than you care for the halfpence you throw to a 
beggar, and she lets out really sublime things. Nothing will 
ever convince her that an old diplomat is a handsome young 
man, and a million of francs would not make her change her 
opinion. Her love for a man is a perpetual flattery. Enjoy- 
ing really insolent health, her teeth are two-and-thirty Ori- 
ental pearls set in coral. Her ‘ snout ’ — so she calls the lower 
part of her face — is, as Shakespeare has it, as fresh and sweet 
as a heifer’s muzzle. And it can give bitter pain ! She re- 
spects fine men, strong men — an Adolphus, an Augustus, an 
Alexander — acrobats and tumblers. Her teacher, a horrible 
Cassandro, thrashed her unmercifully ; it costs thousands of 
blows to give her such agility, grace, and intrepidity.” 

“You are drunk with Malaga ! ” said the Countess. 

“ Her name is Malaga only on the posters,” said Paz, with 
a look of annoyance. “She lives in the Rue Saint-Lazare, 
in a little apartment on the third floor, in velvet and silk, like 
a princess. She leads two lives — one as a dancer, and one as 
a pretty woman.” 

“ And does she love you? ” 

“She loves me — you will laugh — solely because I am a 
Pole. She sees in every Pole a Poniatowski, as he is shown 
in the print, jumping into the Elster ; for to every French- 
man the Elster, in which it is impossible to drown, is a 
foaming torrent which swallowed up Poniatowski. And with 
all this I am very unhappy, madame ” 

Clementine was touched by a tear of rage in the captain’s 
eye. 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


363 


“ You love the extraordinary, you men,” said she. 

“ And you ? ” asked Thaddeus. 

“ I know Adam so well that I know he could forget me for 
some acrobatic tumbler like your Malaga. But where did 
you find her ? ” 

“At Saint-Cloud, last September, at the fair. She was 
standing in a corner of the platform covered with canvas 
where the performers walk round. Her comrades, all dressed 
as Poles, were making a terrific Babel. I saw her silent and 
dreamy, and fancied I could guess- that her thoughts were 
melancholy. Was there not enough to make her so — a girl 
of twenty? That was what touched me.” 

The Countess was leaning in a bewitching attitude, pensive, 
almost sad. 

“Poor, poor Thaddeus ! ” she exclaimed. And with the 
good-fellowship of a really great lady, she added, not without 
a meaning smile, “ Go ; go to the circus ! ” 

Thaddeus took her hand and kissed it, dropping a hot tear, 
and then went out. After having invented a passion for a 
circus-rider, he must give it some reality. Of his whole story 
nothing had been true but the minute attention he had given 
to the famous Malaga, the rider of the Bouthor troupe at 
Saint-Cloud ; her name had just caught his eye on an adver- 
tisement of the circus. The clown, bribed by a single five- 
franc piece, had told Paz that the girl was a foundling, or 
had perhaps been stolen. 

Thaddeus now went to the circus and saw the handsome 
horsewoman again. For ten francs, a groom — they fill the 
place of dressers at a circus — informed him that Malaga’s 
name was Marguerite Turquet, and that she lived in the Rue 
des Fosses-de-Temple, on a fifth floor. 

Next day, with death in his soul, Paz found his way to that 
quarter, and asked for Mademoiselle Turquet, in summer the 
understudy of the principal rider at the cirque, and in winter 
“ a super ” in a Boulevard theatre. 


3G4 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


“ Malaga ! ” shouted the doorkeeper, rushing into the attic, 
“ here is a fine gentleman for you ! He is asking Chapuzot 
all about you ; and Chapuzot is cramming him to give me 
time to let you know.” 

“Thank you, Madame Chapuzot; but what will he say to 
find me ironing my gown ? ” 

“ Pooh, stuff! When a man is in love, he loves everything 
about you.” 

“ Is he an Englishman ? They are fond of horses.” 

“ No. He looks to me like a Spaniard.” 

“ So much the worse. The Spaniards are down in the 
market they say. Stay here, Madame Chapuzot, I shall not 
look so left to myself.” 

“Who were you wanting, monsieur?” said the woman, 
opening the door to Thaddeus. 

“ Mademoiselle Turquet.” 

“My child,” said the porter’s wife, wrapping her shawl 
round her, “ here is somebody asking for you.” 

A rope on which some linen was airing knocked off the 
captain’s hat. 

“What is your business, monsieur?” asked Malaga, pick- 
ing it up. 

“I saw you at the circus; you remind me, mademoiselle, 
of a daughter I lost ; and out of affection for my Heloise, 
whom you are so wonderfully like, I should wish to be of use 
to you, if you will allow me.” 

“Well, to be sure ! But sit down, Monsieur le General,” 
said Madame Chapuzot. “You cannot say fairer — nor 
handsomer.” 

“I am not by way of love-making, my good lady,” said 
Paz. “ I am a father in deep distress, eager to be cheated by 
a likeness.” 

“And so I am to pass as your daughter?” said Malaga, 
very roguishly, and without suspecting the absolute truth of 
the statement. 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


365 


“ Yes/’ said Paz. “I will come sometimes to see you; 
and that the illusion may be perfect, I will place you in hand- 
some lodgings, nicely furnished ” 

“ I shall have furniture of my own?” said Malaga, looking 
at Madame Chapuzot. 

“And servants,” Paz went on; “and live quite at your 
ease.” 

Malaga looked at the stranger from under her brow. 

“ From what country are you, monsieur? ” 

“ I am a Pole.” 

“ Then I accept,” said she. 

Paz went away, promising to call again. 

“ That is a tough one ! ” said Marguerite Turquet, looking 
at Madame Chapuzot. “ But I am afraid this man is wheed- 
ling me to humor some fancy. Well, I will risk it.” 

A month after this whimsical scene, the fair circus-rider 
was established in rooms charmingly furnished by Count 
Adam’s upholsterer, for Paz wished that his folly should be 
talked about in the Laginski household. Malaga, to whom 
the adventure was like an Arabian Night’s dream, was waited 
on by the Chapuzot couple — at once her servants and her 
confidants. The Chapuzots and Marguerite Turquet expected 
some startling climax ; but at the end of three months, neither 
Malaga nor the Chapuzots could account for the Polish 
Count’s fancy. Paz would spend about an hour there once a 
week, during which he sat in the drawing-room, never choos- 
ing to go either into Malaga’s boudoir nor into her bedroom, 
which, in fact, he never entered in spite of the cleverest 
manoeuvring on her part and on that of the Chapuzots. The 
Count inquired about the little incidents that varied the 
horsewoman’s life, and on going away he always left two 
forty-franc pieces on the chimney-shelf. 

“ He looks dreadfully bored,” said Madame Chapuzot. 

“Yes,” replied Malaga, “ that man is as cold as frost after 
a thaw.” 


366 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


“ He is a jolly good fellow, all the same,” cried Chapuzot, 
delighted to see himself dressed in blue Elbeuf cloth, and as 
smart as a minister’s office-messenger. 

Paz, by his periodical tribute, made Marguerite Turquet an 
allowance of three hundred and twenty francs a month. 
This sum, added to her small earnings at the circus, secured 
her a splendid existence as compared with her past squalor. 
Strange tales were current among the performers at the circus 
as to Malaga’s good fortune. The girl’s vanity allowed her 
rent to be stated at sixty thousand francs, instead of the 
modest six thousand which her rooms cost the prudent 
captain. According to the clowns and supers, Malaga ate 
off silver plate; and she certainly came to the circus in pretty 
burnouses, in shawls, and elegant scarfs. And, to crown all, 
the Pole was the best fellow a circus-rider could come across ; 
never tiresome, never jealous, leaving Malaga perfect freedom. 

“Some women are so lucky!” said Malaga’s rival. 
“ Such a thing would never happen to me, though I bring in 
a third of the receipts.” 

Malaga wore smart “coal-scuttles,” and sometimes gave 
herself airs in a carriage in the Bois de Boulogne, where the 
youth of fashion began to observe her. In short, Malaga 
was talked about in the flash world of equivocal women, and 
her good fortune was attacked by calumny. She was reported 
to be a somnambulist, and the Pole was said to be a magnet- 
in search of the philosopher’s stone. Other comments 
A a far more venomous taint made Malaga more inquisitive 
than Psyche ; she reported them, with tears, to Paz. 

“ When I owe a woman a grudge,” said she to conclude, 
“I do not calumniate her, I do not say that a man magnet- 
izes her to find stones. I say that she is a bad lot, and I 
prove it. Why do you get me into trouble ? ” 

Paz was cruelly speechless. 

Madame Chapuzot succeeded at last in discovering his 
name and title. Then, at the Hotel Laginski, she ascertained 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


367 


some positive facts : Thaddeus was unmarried j he was not 
known to have a dead daughter either in Poland or France. 
Malaga could not help feeling a thrill of terror. 

“My dear child/’ exclaimed Madame Chapuzot, “that 
monster ’ ’ 

A man who was satisfied with gazing at a beautiful creature 
like Malaga— gazing at her by stealth— from under his brows 
- not daring to come to any decision — without any confi- 
dence ; such a man, in Madame Chapuzot’s mind, must be a 
monster. “That monster is breaking you in, to lead you on 
to something illegal or criminal. God above us ! if you were 
to be brought up at the assizes— and it makes me shudder 
from head to foot to think of it, I quake only to speak of it 
— or in the criminal court, and your name was in the news- 
papers ! Do you know what I should do in your place ? 

Well, in your place, to make all safe, I should warn the 
police.” 

One day, when mad notions were fermenting in Malaga’s 
brain, Paz having laid his gold-pieces on the velvet chimney- 
shelf, she snatched up the money and flung it in his face, say- 
ing, “ I will not take stolen money ! ” 

The captain gave the gold to the Chapuzots, and came no 
more. 

Clementine was spending the summer on the estate of her 
uncle, the Marquis de Ronquerolles, in Burgundy. 

When the troupe at the circus no longer saw Thaddeus in 
his seat, there was a great talk among the artists. Malaga’s 
magnanimity was regarded as folly by some, as cunning by 
others. The Pole’s behavior, as explained to the most ex- 
perienced of the women, seemed inexplicable. In the course 
of a single week, Thaddeus received thirty-seven letters from 
women of the town. Happily for him, his singular reserve 
gave rise to no curiosity in fashionable circles, and remained 
the subject of discussion in the flash set only. 

Two months later, the handsome rider, swamped in debt, 


368 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS . 


wrote to Count Paz the following letter, which the dandies of 
the day regarded as a masterpiece : 

“ You, whom I still venture to call my friend, will you not 
take pity on me after what passed between us, which you took 
so ill ? My heart disowns everything that could hurt your 
feelings. If I was so happy as to make you feel some charm 

when you sat near me, as you used to do, come again 

otherwise, I shall sink into despair. Poverty has come upon 
me already, and you do not know what stupid things it brings 
with it. Yesterday I lived on a herring for two sous and one 
sou’s worth of bread. Is that a breakfast for the woman you 
love ? The Chapuzots have left me after seeming so devoted 
to me. Your absence has shown me the shallowness of human 
attachment. A bailiff, who turned a deaf ear to me, has 
seized everything on behalf of the landlord, who has no pity, 
and of the jeweler, who will not wait even ten days ; for with 
you men, credit vanishes with confidence. What a position 
for a woman who has nothing to reproach herself for but a 
little amusement ! My dear friend, I have taken everything 
of any value to my uncle’s ; I have nothing left but my 
memory of you, and the hard weather is coming on. All 
through the winter I shall have no fire, since nothing but 
melodrama is played at the Boulevard, in which I have noth- 
ing to do but tiny parts, which do not show a woman off. 
How could you misunderstand my noble feelings towards you, 
for, after all, we have not two ways of expressing our grati- 
tude ? How is it that you, who seemed so pleased to see me 
comfortable, could leave me in misery ? Oh, my only friend 
on earth, before I go back to travel from fair to fair with the 
Bouthors — for so, at any rate, I can make my living — forgive 
me for wanting to know if I have really lost you for ever. If 
I should happen to think of you just as I was jumping through 
the hoop, I might break my legs by missing time. Come 
what may, I am yours for life. Marguerite Turquet.” 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


369 


“This letter,” exclaimed Thaddeus, shouting with laugh- 
ter, “ is well worth my ten thousand francs.” 

Clementine came home on the following day, and Paz saw 
her once more, lovelier and more gracious than ever. During 
dinner the Countess preserved an air of perfect indifference 
towards Thaddeus, but a scene took place between the Count 
and his wife after their friend had left. Thaddeus, with an 
affectation of asking Adam’s advice, had left Malaga’s letter 
in his hands, as if by accident. 

“Poor Thaddeus !” said Adam to his wife, after seeing 
Paz make his escape. “ What a misfortune for a man of his 
superior stamp to be the plaything of a ballet-girl of the lowest 
class! He will love anything; he will degrade himself; he 
will be unrecognizable before long. Here, my dear, read 
that,” and he handed her Malaga’s letter. 

Clementine read the note, which smelt of tobacco, and 
tossed it awav with disgust. 

“ However thick the bandage over his eyes may be, he must 
have found something out. Malaga must have played him 
some faithless trick.” 

“And he is going back to her ! ” cried Clementine. “ He 
will forgive her ! You men can have no pity for any but those 
horrible women ! ” 

“ They need it so badly ! ” said Adam. 

“Thaddeus did himself justice — by keeping to himself!” 
said she. 

“ Oh, my dearest, you go too far,” said the Count, who, 
though he was at first delighted to lower his friend in his 
wife’s eyes, would not be the death of the sinner. 

Thaddeus, who knew Adam well, had begged for absolute 
secrecy ; he had only spoken, he said, as an excuse for his 
dissipations, and to beg his friend to allow him to have a 
thousand crowns for Malaga. 

“ He is a man of great pride,” Adam went on. 

“ What do you mean ? ” 

24 


370 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


“ Well, to have spent no more than ten thousand francs on 
her, and to wait for such a letter as that to rouse him before 
taking her the money to pay her debts ! For a Pole, on my 
honor ! ” 

“ But he may ruin you ! ” said Clementine in the acrid tone 
of a Parisian woman when she expresses her cat-like distrust- 
fulness. 

“Oh! I understand him,” said Adam. “He would sac- 
rifice Malaga to us.” 

“ We shall see,” replied the Countess. 

“If it were needful for his happiness, I should not hesitate 
to ask him to give her up. Constantine tells me that during 
the time when he was seeing her, Paz, usually so sober, some- 
times came in quite fuddled. If he allowed himself to take 
to drink, I should be as much grieved as if he were my son.” 

“ Do not tell me any more ! ” cried the Countess with an- 
other gesture of disgust. 

Two days later the captain could see in her manner, in the 
tone of her voice, in her eyes, the terrible results of Adam’s 
betrayal. Scorn had opened gulfs between him and this 
charming woman. And he fell forthwith into deep melan- 
choly, devoured by this thought, “You have made yourself 
unworthy of her.” Life became a burden to him ; the bright 
sunshine was gloomy in his eyes. Nevertheless, under these 
floods of bitter thought, he had some happy moments : he 
could now give himself up without danger to his admiration 
for the Countess, who never paid him the slightest attention 
when, at a party, hidden in a corner, mute, all eyes and all 
heart, he did not lose one of her movements, not a note of 
her song when she sang. He lived in this enchanting life: 
he might himself groom the horse that she was to ride, and 
devote himself to the management of her splendid house with 
redoubled care for its interests. 

These unspoken joys were buried in his heart like those of 
a mother, whose child never knows anything of his mother’s 


371 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 

heart : for is it knowledge so long as even one thing remains 
unknown ? Was not this finer than Petrarch’s chaste passion 
for Laura, which, after all, was well repaid by a wealth of 
glory, and by the triumph of the poetry she had inspired ? 
Was not the emotion which Assas felt in dying, in truth a 
whole life? This emotion Paz felt every day without dying, 
but also without the guerdon of immortality. 

What is there in love that Paz, notwithstanding these 
secret delights, was consumed by sorrow? The Catholic 
religion has so elevated love that she has married it insep- 
arably, so to speak, to esteem and generosity. Love does 
not exist apart from the fine qualities of which man is proud, 
and so rarely are we loved if we are contemned, that Thad- 
deus was perishing of his self-inflicted wounds. Only to 
hear her say that she could have loved him, and then to die ! 
The hapless lover would have thought his life well paid for. 
The torments of his previous position seemed to him prefer- 
able to living close to her, loading her with his generosity 
without being appreciated or understood. In short, he wanted 
the price of his virtue. 

He grew thin and yellow, and fell so thoroughly ill, con- 
sumed by low fever, that during the month of January he 
kept his bed, though refusing to see a physician. Count 
Adam grew extremely uneasy about his poor Thaddeus. The 
Countess then was so cruel as to say, when they were together 
one day, “Let him alone; do you not see that he has some 
Olympian remorse?” 

This speech stung Thaddeus to the verge of despair; he 
got up, went out, tried some amusement, and recovered his 
health. 

In the month of February, Adam lost a rather considerable 
sum at the Jockey Club, and, being afraid of his wife, he 
begged Thaddeus to place this sum to the account of his 
extravagance for Malaga. 

“ What is there strange in the notion that the ballet-girl 


372 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


should have cost you twenty thousand francs ? It concerns 
no one but me. Whereas, if the Countess should know that 
I had lost it at play, I should fall in her esteem, and she 
would be in alarm for the future.” 

“This to crown all ! ” cried Thaddeus, with a deep sigh. 

“Ah! Thaddeus, this service would make us quits if I 
were not already the debtor.” 

“Adam, you may have children. Give up gambling,” 
said his friend. 

“And twenty thousand francs more that Malaga has cost 
us!” exclaimed the Countess some days after, on discover- 
ing Adam’s generosity to Paz. “ And ten thousand before 
— that is thirty thousand in all ! Fifteen hundred francs a 
year, the price of my box at the Italian opera, a whole for- 
tune to many people. Oh ! you Poles are incomprehen- 
sible ! ” cried she, as she picked some flowers in her beautiful 
conservatory. “ You care no more than that ! ” 

“ Poor Paz ” 

“Poor Paz, poor Paz!” she echoed, interrupting him. 
“ What good does he do us ? I will manage the house my- 
self ! Give him the hundred louis a year that he refused, 
and let him make his own arrangements with the Olympic 
Circus.” 

“He is of the greatest use to us; he has saved us at least 
forty thousand francs this year. In short, my dearest, he has 
placed a hundred thousand francs for us in Nucingen’s bank, 
and a steward would have netted them.” 

Clementine was softened, but she was not the less hard on 
Thaddeus. 

Some days after she desired Paz to come to her in her 
boudoir, where, a year since, she had been startled by com- 
paring him with the Count. This time she received him 
alone, without any suspicion of danger. 

“My dear Paz,” said she, with the careless familiarity of 
fine folks to their inferiors, “ if you love Adam as you say 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


373 


you do, you will do one thing which he will never ask, but 

which I, as his wife, do not hesitate to require of you ” 

“ It is about Malaga,” said Thaddeus with deep irony. 

“ Well, yes, it is,” she said. “If you want to end your 
days with us, if you wish that we should remain friends, give 

her up. How can an old soldier ” 

“I am but five-and-thirty, and have not a gray hair ! ” 
“You look as if you had,” said she, “ and that is the same 
thing. How can a man so capable of putting two and two 
together, so superior ” 

What was horrible was that she spoke the word with such an 
evident intention of rousing in him the nobleness of soul 
which she believed to be dead. 

“So superior as you are,” she went on, after a little pause, 
which a gesture from Paz forced upon her, “allow yourself 
to be entrapped like a boy. Your affair with her has made 
Malaga famous. Well ! My uncle wanted to see her, and 
he saw her. My uncle is not the only one ; Malaga is very 
ready to receive all these gentlemen. I believed you to be 
high-minded. Take shame to yourself! Come, would she 
be an irreparable loss to you?” 

“ Madame, if I knew of any sacrifice by which I might 
recover your esteem, it would soon be made ; but to give up 

Malaga is not a sacrifice ” 

“ In your place that is what I should say if I were a man,” 
replied Clementine. “ Well, but if I take it as a great sacri- 
fice, there is nothing to be angry at.” 

Paz went away, fearing he might do some mad act ; he felt 
his brain invaded by crazy notions. He went out for a walk, 
lightly dressed in spite of the cold, but failed to cool the 
burning of his face and brow. “ I believed you to be high- 
minded ! ” He heard the words again and again. “And 
scarcely a year ago,” said he to himself, “to hear Clemen- 
tine, I had beaten the Russians single-handed ! ” He thought 
of quitting the Laginski household, of asking to be sent on 


374 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


service in the Spahi Regiment, and getting himself killed in 
Africa; but a dreadful fear checked him: “What would 
become of them without me ? They would soon be ruined. 
Poor Countess, what a horrible life it would be for her to be 
reduced even to thirty thousand francs a year ! Come,” said 
he to himself, “since she can never be yours, courage, finish 
your work ! ” 

As all the world knows, since 1830 the Carnival in Paris 
has grown to prodigious proportions, making it European, 
and burlesque, and animated to a far greater degree than the 
departed carnivals of Venice. Is this because, since fortunes 
have so enormously diminished, Parisians have thought of 
amusing themselves collectively, just as in their clubs they 
have a drawing-room without any mistress of the house, with- 
out politeness, and quite cheap? Be this as it may, the month 
of March was prodigal of those balls, where dancing, farce, 
coarse fun, delirium, grotesque figures, and banter made keen 
by Paris wit, achieved gigantic results. This madness had its 
pandemonium at that time in the Rue Saint-Honore, and its 
Napoleon in Musard, a little man born to rule an orchestra as 
tremendous as the rampant mob, and to conduct a galop — 
that whirl of witches at their Sabbath, and one of Auber’s 
triumphs, for the galop derived its form and its poetry from 
the famous galop in Gustavus. May not this vehement finale 
serve as a symbol of an age when, for fifty years, everything 
has rushed on with the swiftness of a dream ? 

Now, our grave Thaddeus, bearing an immaculate image 
in his heart, went to Malaga to invite her, the queen of car- 
nival dancing, to spend an evening at Musard’s as soon as he 
learned that the Countess, disguised to the teeth, was intend- 
ing to come with two other young ladies, escorted by their 
husbands, to see the curious spectacle of one of these monster 
balls. On Shrove Tuesday night, in the year of grace 1838, 
at four o’clock in the morning, the Countess, wrapped in a 
black domino, and seated on a bench of one of the amphi- 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


375 


theatres of the Babylonian hall where Valentino has since 
given his concerts, saw Thaddeus, dressed as Robert Macaire, 
leading the circus-rider in the costume of a savage, her head 
dressed with nodding plumes like a horse at a coronation, 
and leaping among the groups like a perfect Jack-o’-lantern. 

“ Oh ! ” exclaimed Clementine to her husband, “ you 
Poles are not men of character. Who would not have felt 
sure of Thaddeus? He gave me his word, not knowing 
that I should be here and see all without being seen.” 

Some days after this she invited Paz to dinner. After 
dinner, Adam left them together, and Clementine scolded 
Thaddeus in such a way as to make him feel that she would 
no longer have him about the house. 

“Indeed, madame,” said Thaddeus, humbly, “you are 
quite right. I am a wretch ; I had pledged my word. But 
what can I do ? I put off the parting with Malaga till after 
the Carnival. And I will be honest with you ; the woman 
has so much power over me.” 

“A woman who gets herself turned out of Musard’s by the 
police, and for such dancing? ” 

“ I admit it ; I sit condemned ; I will quit your house. 
But you know Adam. If I hand over to you the conduct of 
your affairs, you will have to exert great energy. Though I 
have the vice of Malaga, I know how to keep an eye on your 
concerns, how to manage your household, and superintend 
the smallest details. Allow me then to remain until I have 
seen you qualified to continue my system of management. 
You have now been married three years, and are safe from the 
first follies consequent on the honeymoon. The ladies of 
Paris society, even with the highest titles, understand very 
well in these days how to control a fortune and a household. 
Well, as soon as I am assured, not of your capacity, but of 
your firmness, I will leave Paris.” 

“It is Thaddeus of Warsaw that speaks, not Thaddeus of 
the circus. Come back to us cured.” 


376 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


“ Cured? Never ! ” said Paz, his eye fixed on Clementine’s 
pretty feet. “ You cannot know, Countess, all the spice, the 
unexpectedness there is in that woman’s wit.” And feeling 
his courage fail him, he added : “ There is not a single woman 
of fashion, with her prim airs, who is worth that frank young 
animal nature.” 

“ In fact, I should not choose to have anything in me of 
the animal ! ” said the Countess, with a flashing look like an 
adder in a rage. 

After that day Count Paz explained to Clementine all her 
affairs, made himself her tutor, taught her the difficulties of 
managing her property, the real cost of things, and the way 
to avoid being too extensively robbed by her people. She 
might trust Constantine, and make him her major-domo. 
Thaddeus had trained Constantine. By the month of May 
he thought the Countess perfectly capable of administering 
her fortune ; for Clementine was one of those clear-sighted 
women whose instincts are alert, with an inborn genius for 
household rule. 

The situation thus naturally brought about by Thaddeus 
took a sudden turn most distressing for him, for his sufferings 
were not so light as he made them seem. The hapless lover 
had not reckoned with accident. Adam fell very seriously ill. 
Thaddeus, instead of leaving, installed himself as his friend’s 
sick-nurse. His devotedness was indefatigable. A woman who 
had had an interest in looking through the telescope of fore- 
sight would have seen in the captain’s heroism the sort of 
punishment which noble souls inflict on themselves to subdue 
their involuntary thoughts of sin ; but women see everything 
or nothing, according to their frame of mind ; love is their 
sole luminary. 

For forty-five days Paz watched and nursed Mitgislas with- 
out seeming to have a thought of Malaga, for the excellent 
reason that he never did think of her. Clementine, seeing 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


377 


Adam at death’s door, and yet not dead, had a consultation 
of the most famous doctors. 

“If he gets through this,” said the most learned of the 
physicians, “it can only be by an effort of nature. It lies 
with those who nurse him to watch for the moment and aid 
nature. The Count’s life is in the hands of his attendants.” 

Thaddeus went to communicate this verdict to Clementine, 
who was sitting in the Chinese pavilion, as much to rest after 
her fatigues as to leave the field free for the doctors, and not 
to be in their way. As he trod the graveled paths leading 
from the boudoir to the rockery on which the Chinese sum- 
mer-house was built, Clementine’s lover felt as though he 
were in one of the gulfs described by Alighieri. The un- 
happy man had never foreseen the chance of becoming Cle- 
mentine’s husband, and he had bogged himself in a swamp of 
mud. When he reached her his face was set, sublime in its 
despair. Like Medusa’s head, it communicated terror. 

“ He is dead ? ” said Clementine. 

“ They have given no hope ; at least, they leave it to nature. 
Do not go in just yet. They are still there, and Bianchon 
himself is examining him.” 

“ Poor fellow ! I wonder whether I have ever worried 
him,” she said. 

“You have made him very happy; be quite easy on that 
point,” said Thaddeus; “and you have been indulgent to 
him ” 

“ The loss will be irreparable.” 

“ But, dear lady, supposing the Count should die, had you 
not formed your opinion of him?” 

“ I do not love him blindly,” she said ; “ but I loved as a 
wife ought to love her husband.” 

“Then,” said Thaddeus, in a voice new to Clementine’s 
experience of him, “ you ought to feel less regret than if you 
were losing one of those men who are a woman’s pride, her 
love, her whole life ! You maybe frank with such a friend as 


378 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


I am I shall regret him — I ! Long before your marriage 

I had made him my child, and I have devoted my life to him. 
I shall have no interest left on earth. But life still has charms 
for a widow of four-and-twenty.” 

“ Why, you know very well that I love no one,” said she, 
with the roughness of sorrow. 

“ You do not know yet what it is to love,” said Thaddeus. 

“ Oh ! husband for husband, I have sense enough to prefer 
a child like my poor Adam to a superior man. For nearly a 
month now we have been asking ourselves, * Will he live ? * 
These fluctuations have prepared me, as they have you, for 
this end. I may be frank with you ? Well, then, I would 
give part of my life to save Adam. Does not independence 
for a woman, here in Paris, mean liberty to be gulled by the 
pretense of love in men who are ruined or profligate ? I have 
prayed God to spare me my husband — so gentle, such a good 
fellow, so little fractious, and who was beginning to be a little 
afraid of me.” 

“ You are honest, and I like you the better for it,” said 
Thaddeus, taking Clementine’s hands, which she allowed him 
to kiss. “ In such a solemn moment there is indescribable 
satisfaction in finding a woman devoid of hypocrisy. It is 
possible to talk to you. Consider the future ; supposing God 
should not listen to you — and I am one of those who are most 
ready to cry to Him : Spare my friend ! — for these fifty nights 
past have not made my eyes heavy, and if thirty days and 
thirty nights more care are needed, you, madame, may sleep 
while I watch. I will snatch him from death, if, as they say, 
he can be saved by care. But if, in spite of you, in spite of 
me, the Count is dead. Well, then, if you were loved, or 
worshiped, by a man whose heart and character were worthy 
of yours ” 

“I have perhaps madly wished to be loved, but I have 
never met ” 

“ Supposing you were mistaken,” 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


379 


Clementine looked steadily at Thaddeus, suspecting him 
less of loving her than of a covetous dream ; she poured con- 
tempt on him by a glance, measuring him from head to foot, 
and crushed him with two words, “ Poor Malaga ! ” pro- 
nounced in those tones such as fine ladies alone can find in 
the gamut of their contempt. 

She rose and left Thaddeus fainting, for she did not turn 
round, but walked with great dignity back to her boudoir, 
and thence up to her husband’s room. 

An hour later Paz returned to the sick man’s bedside, and 
gave all his care to the Count, as though he had not received 
his own death-blow. 

From that dreadful moment he became silent ; he had a 
duel to fight with disease, and he carried it through in a way 
that excited the admiration of the doctors. At any hour his 
eyes were always beaming like two lamps. Without showing 
the slightest resentment towards Clementine, he listened to 
her thanks without accepting them ; he seemed deaf. He 
had said to himself, “ She shall owe Adam’s life to me ! ” and 
these words he had, as it were, written in letters of fire in the 
sick man’s room. 

At the end of a fortnight Clementine was obliged to give 
up some of the nursing, or risk falling ill from so much 
fatigue. Paz was inexhaustible. At last, about the end of 
August, Bianchon, the family doctor, answered for the Count’s 
life— 

“Ah, madame,” said he to Clementine, “you are under 
not the slightest obligation to me. But for his friend we 
could not have saved him ! ” 

On the day after the terrible scene in the Chinese pavilion, 
the Marquis de Ronquerolles had come to see his nephew, for 
he was setting out for Russia with a secret mission ; and Paz, 
overwhelmed by the previous evening, had spoken a few words 
to the diplomat. 


Z 


380 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


On the very day when Count Adam and his wife went out 
for the first time for a drive, at the moment when the carriage 
was turning from the steps, an orderly came into the court- 
yard and asked for Count Paz. Thaddeus, who was sitting 
with his back to the horses, turned round to take a letter 
bearing the stamp of the minister for foreign affairs, and put 
it into the side-pocket of his coat, with a decision which 
precluded any questions on the part of Clementine or Adam. 
It cannot be denied that persons of good breeding are masters 
of the language that uses no speech. Nevertheless, as they 
reached the Porte Maillot, Adam, assuming the privilege of a 
convalescent whose every whim must be indulged, said to 
Thaddeus — 

“ There can be no indiscretions between two brothers 
who love each other as you and I do ; you know what is in 
that letter ; tell me, I am in a fever of curiosity to know it 
also.” 

Clementine looked at Thaddeus as an angry woman can, 
and said to her husband, “ He has been so sulky with me 
these two months that I shall take good care not to press 
him.” 

“ Oh dear me!” replied Thaddeus, “ as I cannot hinder 
the newspapers from publishing it, I .may very well reveal the 
secret. The Emperor Nicholas does me the favor of appoint- 
ing me captain on service in a regiment starting with the 
Khiva Expedition.” 

“ And you are going?” cried Adam. 

“ I shall go, my dear fellow. I came as captain, and as 
captain I return. Malaga might lead me to make a fool of 
myself. We shall dine together to-morrow for the last time. 
If I did not set out in September for St. Petersburg, I should 
have to travel overland, and I am not rich. I must leave 
Malaga her little independence. How can I fail to provide 
for the future of the only woman who has understood me ? 
Malaga thinks me a great man ? Malaga thinks me hand- 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


381 


some ! Malaga may perhaps be faithless, but she would go 
through ” 

“ Through a hoop for you, and fall on her feet on horse- 
back ! ” said Clementine, sharply. 

“ Oh, you do not know Malaga,” said the captain, with 
deep bitterness, and an ironical look which made Clementine 
uneasy and silent. 

“ Farewell to the young trees of this lovely Bois de Bou- 
logne, where Parisian ladies drive, and the exiles wander who 
have found a home here. I know that my eyes will never 
again see the green trees of the Allee de Mademoiselle, or of 
the Route des Dames, nor the acacias, nor the cedar at the 
Ronds-points. 

“ On the Asiatic frontier, obedient to the schemes of the 
great Emperor I have chosen to be my master, promoted 
perhaps to command an army, for sheer courage, for con- 
stantly risking my life, I may indeed regret the Champs- 
* 

Elysees where you, once, made me take a place in the car- 
riage, by your side. Finally, I shall never cease to regret 
the severity of Malaga — of the Malaga I am at this moment 
thinking of.” 

This was said in a tone that made Clementine shiver. 

“ Then you love Malaga very truly ? ” she said. 

“ I have sacrificed for her the honor w r e never sacrifice ” 

“ Which?” 

11 That which we would fain preserve at any cost in the eyes 
of the idol we worship.” 

After this speech Thaddeus kept an impenetrable silence; he 

✓ 

broke it only when, as they drove down the Champs-Elysees, 
he pointed to a wooden structure and said, “ There is the 
circus ! ” 

Before their last dinner he went to the Russian embassy for 
a few minutes, and thence to the minister for foreign affairs, 
and he started for Havre next morning before the Countess 
and Adam were up. 


382 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


“I have lost a friend,” said Adam, with tears in his eyes, 
when he learned that Count Paz was gone, “ a friend in the 
truest sense of the word, and I cannot think what has made 
him flee from my house as if it were the plague. We are not 
the sort of friends to quarrel over a woman,” he went on, 
looking full at Clementine, “and yet all he said yesterday 
was about Malaga. But he never laid the tip of his finger on 
the girl.” 

“ How do you know? ” asked Clementine. 

“ Well, I was naturally curious to see Mademoiselle Tur- 
quet, and the poor girl cannot account for Thaddeus’ extra- 
ordinary reserve ” 

“ That is enough,” said the Countess, going off to her own 
room, and saying to herself, “ I have surely been the victim 
of some sublime hoax.” 

She had scarcely made the reflection, when Constantine 
placed in h^r hands the following letter, which Thaddeus had 
scrawled n the night : 

• r 

“ Countess: — To go to be killed in the Caucasus, and to 
bear the burden of your scorn, is too much ; a man should 
die unmutilated. I loved you from the first time I saw you, 
as a man loves the woman he will love for ever, even when 
she is faithless — I, under obligations to Adam, whom you 
chose and married — I, so poor, the volunteer steward, de- 
voted to your household. In this dreadful catastrophe I 
found a delightful existence. To be an indispensable wheel 
in the machine, to know myself useful to your luxury and 
comfort, was a source of joy to me ; and if that joy had 
been keen when Adam alone was my care, think what it 
must have been when the woman I worshiped was at once 
the cause and the effect! I have known all the joys of 
motherhood in my love ; and I accepted life on those terms. 
Like the beggars on the high-roads, I built myself a hut of 
stones on the skirts of your beautiful home, but without hold- 


THE IMAGINARY MIG TRESS. 


383 


ing out my hand for alms. I, poor and unhappy, but blinded 
by Adam’s happiness, I was the donor. Yes, you were hedged 
in by a love as pure as that of a guardian angel ; it watched 
while you slept ; it caressed you with a look as you passed by ; 
it was glad merely to exist ; in short, you were the sunshine 
of home to the hapless exile who is now writing to you, with 
tears in his eyes, as he recalls the happiness of those early 
days. 

“ At the age of eighteen, with no one to love me, I had 
chosen as an ideal mistress a charming woman at Warsaw, to 
whom I referred all my thoughts and my wishes, the queen 
of my days and nights. This woman knew nothing of it, but 
why inform her? For my part, what I loved was love. 

“You may fancy, from this adventure of my boyhood, how 
happy I was, living within the sphere of your influence, 
grooming your horse, picking out new gold-pieces for your 
purse, superintending the splendor of your table md your en- 
tertainments, seeing you eclipse fortunes greater han your 
own by my good management. With what zeal ( id I not 
rush round Paris when Adam said to me, ‘ Thaddeus, she 
wants this or that ! ’ It was one of those joys for which there 
are no words. You have now and again wished for some trifle 
within a certain time which has compelled me to feats of 
expedition, driving for six or seven hours in a cab; and what 
happiness it has been to walk in your service. When I have 
watched you smiling in the midst of your flowers without 
being seen by you, I have forgotten that no one loved me — 
in short, at such moments I was but eighteen again. 

“ Sometimes, when my happiness turned my brain, I would 
go at night and kiss the spot where your feet had left, for me, 
a luminous trace, just as of old I had stolen, with a thief’s 
miraculous skill, to kiss a key which Countess Ladislas had 
touched on opening a door. The air you breathed was em- 
balmed ; to me it was fresh life to breathe it ; and I felt, ~ 
they say is the case in the tropics, overwhelmed by an at 


384 


THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 


sphere surcharged with creative elements. I must tell you all 
these things to account for the strange fatuity of my involun- 
tary thoughts. I would have died sooner than divulge my 
secret. 

“You may remember those few days when you were curi- 
ous, when you wanted to see the worker of the wonders which 
had at last struck you with surprise. I believed — forgive me, 
madame — I believed that you would love me. Your kindli- 
ness, your looks — interpreted by a lover — seemed fraught with 
so much danger to me that I took up Malaga, knowing that 
there are liaisons which no woman can forgive ; I took the 
girl up at the moment when I saw that my love was inevi- 
tably infectious. Overwhelm me now with the scorn which 
you poured upon me so freely when I did not deserve it ; but 
I think I may be quite sure that if, on the evening when your 
aunt took the Count out, I had said what I have here written, 
having once said it I should have been like the tame tiger 
who has at last set his teeth in living flesh, and who scents 
warm blood 


“ Midnight . 

“ I could write no more, the memory of that evening was 
too vivid ! Yes, I was then in a delirium ! I saw expectancy 
in your eyes ; victory and its crimson banners may have 
burned in mine and fascinated yours. My crime was to think 
such things — and perhaps wrongly. You alone can be judge 
of that fearful scene when I succeeded in crushing love, desire, 
the most stupendous forces of manhood under the icy hand 
of gratitude which must be eternal. Your terrible scorn pun- 
ished me. You have showed me that neither disgust nor con- 
tempt can ever be gotten over. I love you like a madman. I 
must have gone away if Adam had died. There is all the 
more reason since Adam is saved. I did not snatch my friend 
from the grave to betray him. And, indeed, my departure is 
the due punishment for the thought that came to me that I 


THE IMAGINARY MIS TR ESS. 


385 


would let him die when the physicians said his life depended 
on his attendants. 

‘‘Farewell, madarne ; in leaving Paris I lose everything, 
but you lose nothing in parting with yours most faithfully, 

“ Thaddeus Paz.” 

“ If my poor Adam says he has lost a friend, what have I 
lost?” thought Clementine, sitting dejected, with her eyes 
fixed on a flower in the carpet. 

This is the note which Constantine delivered privately to 
his master — 

“ My dear Mitgislas : — Malaga has told me all. For the 
sake of your happiness, never let a word escape you in Clem- 
entine’s presence as to your visits to the circus-rider ; let her 
still believe that Malaga costs me a hundred thousand francs. 
With the Countess’ character she will not forgive you either 
your losses at play or your visits to Malaga. I am not going 
to Khiva, but to the Caucasus. I have a fit of spleen, and at 
the pace I mean to go, in three months I shall be Prince Paz, 
or dead. Farewell ; though I have drawn sixty thousand francs 
out of Nucingen’s, we are quits. 

“ Thaddeus.” 

m 

“Idiot that I am ! I very nearly betrayed myself just now 
by speaking of the circus-rider ! ” said Adam to himself. 

Thaddeus has been gone three years, and the papers do not 
as yet mention any Prince Paz. Countess Laginski takes a 
keen interest in the Emperor Nicholas’ expeditions ; she is a 
Russian at heart, and reads with avidity all the news from that 
country. Once or twice a year she says to the ambassador, 
with an affectation of indifference, “ Do you know what has 
become of our poor friend Paz? ” 

Alas! most Parisian women, keen-eyed and subtle as they 
25 


386 THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS. 

■ 

are supposed to be, pass by — and always will pass by — such an 
one as Paz without observing him. Yes, more than one Paz 
remains misunderstood ; but, fearful thought ! some are mis- 
understood even when they are loved. The simplest woman 
in the world requires some little coxcombry in the greatest 
man ; and the most heroic love counts for nothing if it is un- 
cut ; it needs the arts of the polisher and the jeweler. 

In the month of January, 1842, Countess Laginski, beauti- 
fied by gentle melancholy, inspired a mad passion in ti e 
Comte de la Palferine, one of the most audacious bucks of 
Paris at this day. La Palferine understood the difficulty of 
conquering a woman guarded by a chimera; to triumph over 
this bewitching woman, he trusted to a surprise, and to the 
assistance of a woman who, being a little jealous of Clemen- 
tine, would lend herself to plot the chances of the adventure. 

Clementine, incapable with all her wit of suspecting such 
treachery, was so imprudent as to go with this false friend to 
the masked ball at the opera. At about three in the morning, 
carried away by the excitement of the ball, Clementine, for 
whom La Palferine had exhausted himself in attentions, con- 
sented to sup with him, and was getting into the lady’s car- 
riage. At this critical moment she was seized by a strong 
arm, and in spite of her cries placed in her own carriage, 
which was standing with the door open, though she did not 
know that it was waiting. 

“ He has not left Paris ! ” she exclaimed, recognizing Thad- 
deus, who ran off when he saw the carriage drive away with 
the Countess. 

Had ever another woman such a romance in her life ? 

Clementine is always hoping to see Paz again. 

Paris, January, 1842. 


IF Je ’12 


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